Mad Science From Hell
by Rokhal
Summary: Season 5. A hunt goes wrong, weird wrong. Sam's not waking up. Dean and Bobby have their hands full trying to pull him back.
1. Gallons and Gallons

Season 5, shortly after 5.10.  
Gen. Some cursing, violence, black magic. Should run up to 30, 40,000 words.  
Characters were stolen from Kripke.

* * *

Suspended from the high steel rafters was a Brahma bull on a flying trapeze.

It jerked and contorted, bucking, swinging head-down from one broken hind-leg as its eyes bulged from its wide white face, cavernous nostrils slinging bloody foam on the blue-hooded chanters below. Dean's jaw twitched in sympathy. Head-down, the thing was strangling on its own guts.

The chant was in Greek, for an annoying change of pace, which meant that Sam was squinting and mouthing along with the words—Dean always wanted to slap him when he did that—and Dean wasn't even bothering to pick roots out of the mess. Instead he peered around the side of their packing crate, keeping his face in shadow.

There were thirteen witches, most of them tall enough under their sky-blue robes to be men, and no human sacrifice to be found in the whole warehouse. Sam and Bobby had been positive that the ritual they were attempting—to buddy up with some big-name demon called Marbas—demanded the life of a virgin bull and a virgin man, but "life" could be a code word for lots of things. Until the blue bastards and bitches dragged some pimple-faced basement-dweller out of a hockey bag, he and Sam were strictly reconnaissance.

Dean could just _tell_ they were going to pick up some demonic "allies" again, what with Lucifer being such an equal opportunity contemptuous prick, and was not looking forward to the inevitable screwing.

The lead witch pulled a lasso out of his robes and managed to loop the wildly swinging bull around one of its forelegs. There was some shouting and stumbling and dragging, but with four witches laying hands to the rope, they managed to bring the bull to a standstill over the unmarked granite slab they had brought for the altar, and its three foot washbasin. Head Witch left the lasso to the underlings and drew a machete.

The winch at the opposite wall whirred and dropped the bull as it gasped around its huge and purpling tongue. Head Witch pulled the machete across in a clean, powerful swipe, and blood spurted and poured down into the basin as the bull's legs quivered overhead.

The bull's eyes stopped screaming, and Dean had to remind himself that that was normal when critters got their arteries cut. Lucky bastard.

The chanting picked up again.

"They just say New York?" Dean hissed.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Think so. If this is the Salomonic rite, the human sacrifice should be coming up, but I don't see—"

Head Witch tossed back his gory hood, bent his head over the bowl, and slit his own throat.

"Holy shit," Sam breathed, watching two of the assistants step forward and hold the corpse in place by the elbows.

"Nice work ethic," Dean murmured. Head Witch contributed another half-gallon before the flow petered out and the assistants dropped him to the concrete. The chant droned on. Dean heard, "Chicagos."

"Sam. It just me, or do they have some fixation with major cities?"

Sam scrunched his eyebrows together, like he was trying to switch the chanting to instant slow-motion replay with the power of his mind, which was so totally a Sammy power Dean almost wished he could. Almost. Sam's face cleared, and he hefted his shotgun. "S'not just you. We're stopping this."

Dean grinned, raised his pearl Colt. "Now you're talking."

* * *

The rest of the coven didn't take well to the suggestion that they abort the ritual until two of them had salt burning into their throats and faces, and Dean had loosed an iron round into a third's leg as Sam slid new shells into his 12-gauge. The witches grabbed their wounded and bolted, with the promise of Indianapolis' finest on the scene, as soon as they got back into their street clothes and stopped by the emergency room.

That left Sam and Dean with maybe fifteen minutes to look over the dropped ritual paraphernalia and somehow purify a human corpse and ten gallons of blood. Sam snapped a few camera phone pictures and grabbed some pine pallets from a corner, snagging a slept-in refrigerator box for kindling on the way. Dean jogged back from the Impala with the salt-and-burn gear, accelerant sloshing in the jerry-can.

"Tell me there's wood shavings in this place," Dean panted, rolling the shivering corpse onto Sam's makeshift pyre, "sawdust. Ass-load of paper towels."

Sam eyed the brimming basin. "Could salt it, float accelerant on top, and do a ceremonial purification. When we burn bones, it's not like we have to crack open the molars to get rid of the pulp…what?"

Dean had paused, the stream of diesel over the body dribbling to a stop, and was staring at Sam like he'd had a face transplant with Justin Timberlake. At least it was better than the hollow stare that used to make him check his own eye-color in the rear view mirror. "Sam, this here's a half-done blood sacrifice, and _when_ witch boy comes back 'cause his Romeo act got wasted, he's gonna be pissed. We gotta go nucular on that shit."

"It's nuc—sure, if think you can burn it all, go for it." Sam frowned. "But with this ritual, who knows what burning it will do. We get this wrong and the demon might just go ahead and loose a thousand plague dogs anyway."

"Plague dogs, that's a new one," Dean remarked, flicking a match. The diesel flared up in a gout of smoke, burning hot and slow, slow enough for the wood and fat to catch. They smelled burnt hair and polyester.

"They start out as normal dogs, sounds like. They were asking him to turn some into something like daevas and slaughter half the country."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "That'd suck."

"Yeah."

"Better not screw this up, then."

"No."

He watched the fire eat into the corpse's jeans, the hair already crisped away, fingers blackening. Smelled like hot dogs. He huffed. "Dude, it's an offering to a demon. How're we gonna defile _that?_ S'like a backwards oxymoron."

"Non-virgin blood mixed in?" Sam suggested, pulling at one sleeve.

"Sam, you're supposed to be the smart one."

"I'm just saying—these rituals are pretty specific—"

"Let's pile on more wood, get some coals going, and dribble it on nice and slow. The salt oughta tell it hands off. No fancy shit."

Five minutes later, they had five minutes left and not nearly enough fire, in Dean's opinion. The corpse was smoking and steaming, a heady mix of delicious barbecue and vomitous offal perfuming the air. But the coals from the pine pallets were getting nice and strawberry red, and they were running out of lumber. It was painfully hot two feet from the fire, which might barely be up to boiling off ten gallons of liquid.

"On three," said Dean, across the unwieldy basin from Sam. "One, two, three."

The blood sloshed. "Dammit, keep in step," Sam snapped. Their eyes met, Dean watching Sam's face, Sam not daring to look away as the blood steamed under his nostrils, and they froze until the bowl stilled.

Dean looked away first. "Okay. Small steps. And, step." They glided sideways, steady and controlled. "Step. Step." The pyre blazed against his jeans. "And pour."

Nice and slow. They leaned over the coals, smoke stinging, panting in the hot steam that rose when the blood splashed down.

"Okay, let's move it over," Sam grunted, when the heat began to dampen. They still had more than half the bowl to get rid of. Dean had sweat in his eyes, and his palms had grown slick against the glossy steel.

They poured again, more blood dampening the salted fire, and as the basin tilted slowly steeper, it happened. Dean sucked in a breath as the bowl began to slip across his hands. Sam quickly hooked his fingers across the inner edge. The bowl rotated, Dean pushed up on his end to compensate, and blood sloshed over Sam's hand and dribbled down his sleeve.

Sam looked stricken.

"It's an ugly-ass coat," Dean remarked when he got his breath back. "It's had a good run, but—Sam?"

Sam's mouth was clamped shut as though he was trying desperately not to throw up, and he was staring down at his chest as though something was burning him. Dean seized the bowl and heaved the whole thing as squarely over the corpse as he could, the basin clattering to the concrete as he gripped Sam's arms. Sam clutched at his chest with his bloody hand and grunted at Dean, eyes panicked.

"Sam, what? It do something? You gotta get outa here?"

Sam grunted again, swallowing, swallowing, and clamped a hand over his nose and mouth with what looked like bruising force. Something sizzled under his jacket. Dean prodded at him, helpless as Sam's eyes seemed to lose focus, fear-glazed.

Sam gave a muffled whine and his eyes bled black.

"F—!" Dean shouted, dropping him and crab-crawling backwards for the salt, unable to look away from Sam kneeling, curling in on himself, with wide, beetle-black eyes. And then Sam lost his grip.

Light flared through his jacket where the tattoo was, and as Sam's hand slipped down from his mouth, his head slammed back and demon-smoke exploded out of him, buoyed on a raw scream. Not again, not freakin' again, and Dean latched onto the salt gun as the smoke trailed off and churned overhead, swooping around the hanging bull like some deformed dragon, watching like the dark. Dean racked in a shell and pounded a fist against his own tattoo, his muscles burning with shock. "You wanna rock, bitch?" The warehouse echoed, clamorous. The boom of salt through the shrieking demon's center-mass was louder.

The smoke squirmed around the hole from the salt blast and shot for the warehouse door, splattering across the wall before it poured itself through the doorjam. Dean blasted the tail end as it disappeared.

"Sam?" Dean hissed. He set the gun aside and shook his brother by the shoulders. "Sam, wake up. Sam!"

* * *

-

* * *

This is a work in progress, has been since the hiatus after they Abandoned All Hope, and I'm such a slow writer I figure I've got to get it online before the show's over. There's a lot on reserve. Like, three quarters of it.


	2. 99 Percent Perspiration

If Bobby Singer never again had to watch a panicked Dean Winchester dragging his brother's limp form up the porch steps, it would be too soon.

At three a.m, the Chevy's growl had woken him from a fitful sleep, and Dean was staggering up to his door, Sam's body draped over his shoulder. Bobby slammed a fist against his wheelchair arm. Those boys already had too much of this shit.

"Sam won't wake up," Dean barked, stumping right past Bobby and weaving around the tomes on the floor to the couch. "Pulse is fine," he grunted, heaving Sam down. Sam's head flopped awkwardly against the couch arm, eyes open and blank. "He's breathing on his own. Pupils are fine. He blinks. Gags if you stick something down his throat. Demon did something to him, Bobby, and he won't wake up."

"Boy," Bobby growled, "You sit at this table, take a drink, and tell me exactly what the hell is going on. From the beginning."

* * *

It took a quarter bottle of Jack just to get Dean to stop twitching like a kicked cat. The boys had both got some holy water in or on them, Dean had caught him up on the Indianapolis job, and Bobby's heart rate had dropped back down to normal levels. At the couch, Dean peeled up Sam's shirt to reveal his burnt-looking, but intact, tattoo.

"Huh," Bobby remarked. The skin was blistered, but not a line of the pentagram had been so much as warped.

Dean swallowed loudly. "Guess you learn something new every day, right?"

Bobby shook his head slowly. "Boy, this just ain't adding up. I never said those sigils were foolproof, but so far as a demon getting into your brother without somehow marring the thing first, that just don't fit. This thing causes pain to a demon. It can't get into something it's on, and it won't leave it on if it's inside unless it's got a real good reason to put up with it and a hell of a lot of power."

"And the tattoo pushed the demon out just fine," Dean muttered. "Got some _really _interesting side effects, though."

"You want Miracle Max?" Bobby snapped. "Cause you got me. Now I don't know what that demon did to Sam, if it locked him up so tight he hasn't found his way out or if it yanked him out of his body entirely. There's not many psychics I could trust to find out, not for you two, anyhow."

Dean's face was shuttered and he stared at the far wall over Bobby's head.

Bobby sighed. "What has me puzzled is that the tattoo's still there at all. Like I said, one of the things had to give, either the sigil or the demon. If it thought it was being stealthy it could have maybe fixed the sigil as it was leaving, but whatever that was, was not stealthy."

Dean leaned heavily against the couch, and Bobby scowled at the folders of handwritten Navajo medicine tradition three feet out of his reach on a top shelf. Dean's fingers twitched, picking at something brown-black that had dried in the creases of his right thumb. It matched Sam's right wrist and fingers.

"What's the blood from?"

"Sacrifice. The coven wanted Marbas to set a bunch of devil dogs loose on the major cities, start the Apocalypse. Heh. Some crazy mother slit his own throat."

Bobby blinked, felt the creases between his eyebrows fold together. "Demon burst out of Sam while you were cleaning up?"

"Yeah, he—" Dean straightened, like all his tires had just re-inflated. "We did a salt-and-burn, poured the blood on the fire. Virgin bull and a dweeb who sold his soul 'cause he couldn't get any. Sam didn't start freaking out until some spilled on him. God, Bobby—we don't even know how long it was in him."

"Dean," said Bobby, wishing there weren't so many stacks of books on his floor and that the younger man were standing two feet closer, "something weird is going on here. It is far, far too early for you to start making assumptions, you understand me?"

"Right," Dean said, his jacket collar standing up like the mane of an affronted lion. "Let's figure this out."

* * *

It was weak.

It knew so little, but it knew it was weak, adrift, fragile and unfinished like unfired clay, like a fawn dropped too soon in midwinter, like a shoe without a sole, a mouse without a hole. It had no home, and it was so very, very weak.

If it could, it would feel fear, but it had no form to feel it in; it knew only desperation, only yearning for something to hide its formlessness from the abrasive air. Unanchored, its thoughts churned too fast for it to catch, aimless, without understanding. It reached for senses it did not have, confused by the ones it did.

Things hummed. Everywhere was chained lightening: ropes that tangled it, globules and threads that shone so brightly with their beauty in their surging wrapping of earth and water and slow, slow burning fires. It wished to wrap itself around that beauty, fix itself against it, thread itself through that sheltering flesh. But it was so very weak. The dullest of these lights was enough to bat it away.

It drifted bare across the Earth, and the Earth seethed against it, and it was homeless and alone.

* * *

"Get a bowl and a wire brush and scrub your hands off. Sam's, too, and cut the blood out of his coat."

Bobby rolled his caustic coffee around on his tongue and turned back to the frustratingly contradictory accounts of Marbas in the Roman and Orthodox traditions, looking for anything he or Sam had missed the first time around. Dean rummaged around under the sink, and after a few minutes of rasping from him, and half a page of notes from Bobby, presented him with a bowl of blood flakes and dirty canvas.

"Salt and burn?"

"Read my mind. There's some Pam and a barbecue lighter oughta do the trick."

Dean dumped table salt into the bowl and toasted the mess, using the lighter and the cooking spray as a flame thrower.

Bobby jerked his head in Sam's direction, which was all the hint Dean needed to drop the kitchen toys and jog back to the living room. "Any luck?" he called.

"Still out," Dean replied, hangdog, after poking around at Sam's eyelids. "I don't get this. He's not sleeping, and he doesn't look drugged."

"Does he flinch when you stick him with a needle?"

Silence from the living room. Bent over three books and a notepad, Bobby easily ignored the horrified gaping that Dean was surely aiming at his back. There was some rustling and a metallic click.

"Just a bit," Dean said.

The following afternoon, things had settled in: Dean had turned Bobby's living room into a hospice, Bobby had bullied him into a five hour nap, the sun was high in the sky, birds were singing, broken windshields were glittering, and, oh, yeah, Sam was still freakin' catatonic. And Dean was learning far, far more than he wanted to know about Marbas, which wasn't much to start out.

Marbas was the kind of creep who, in Hell, would have taken the shape of a lesser soul and deliberately lain under Alastair's knife just to get an eyeful of what went on in his private "laboratory." Well, Dean had called it the Laboratory, in a Transylvanian accent and everything.

Marbas was a whopping Number 5 on the Salamonic hit list, an engineer, a scientist, a physician of Hell, with a special interest in the duality of body and mind. Dean figured that between him and Alastair, one had to have been the other's bitch at some point; they were distinct and alike like father and son. He wasn't sure which would have been worse: Alastair flaying open his mind and body to reduce him to nothing but fear before slowly building him back up warped and stunted like a Bonsai tree, or Marbas grabbing hold of his limbs and brains and just _twisting_.

President of Hell or not, he was due for a personal "experiment" with the Colt.

Bobby, near as Dean could figure, had updated Demonic Omens, Major Population Centers Edition, collected a stack of books on summonings and minor spirits, and warmed some broth for Sam. He was over in the living room now, feeding a soft rubber tube down Sam's throat.

Not like they had anything else they'd rather do than take care of Sam's bodily functions for him. Lazy bitch.

"You notice anything?" Bobby called as he loaded up a syringe as big around as his thumb. Dean squashed the flutter of hope the words stirred up, reminding himself that Bobby liked his rhetoric in anvil form and his pearls of wisdom gritty and dripping from the oyster. He wasn't asking to see if Dean had cottoned on to some promising theory of his; he just wanted to know.

"Just that he's one twisted sonofabitch," Dean sighed. "I mean, not just demon-twisted. Becky's writer friends twisted."

"Who?"

"Don't ask." Dean blinked at a diagram of the demon's lamen, wishing Sam were doing this; he would know what was important and what wasn't. "His symbol looks kinda like one of the marks for silver, the trident thing, only upside-down. Or a bent Sulphrum. If they wanted him to actually make an appearance, they'd have used something like that in the ritual, right? But I didn't see any. They were wearing blue."

"Blue. What color blue?" Bobby asked, slipping the empty syringe out of the stomach tube and drawing more broth.

"Light. Sky blue, Easter egg blue."

"Huh. Could be Water, could be Aether. Last night was the turn of the new moon, was'nit?"

"Yeah. You think it's some sorta," Dean swallowed, "birth…thing?"

"Well, they were asking him to make plague dogs. You tell me."

"Ugly this famous, shouldn't need any help getting born. Not if he's been kicking around in 15-whenever."

"Might as well scratch him off the list," Bobby remarked.

"What?"

"Well, him personally. Assuming he's got the know-how and the power to get a job done right. Whatever happened to Sam was just stupid. Were they doing a summoning or just an invocation?"

"Dunno, it was in Greek. Alpha, cabbos, Hecate, New Yorkos..."

"Damnit," said Bobby, with feeling. "Greek magic's got forty-syllable palindromes."

* * *

~

* * *

Today's Demonology 101 brought to you by the Key of Solomon, online at sacred-texts dot com.


	3. Differential Diagnosis

If it could, it would feel rage, but it had no form to feel it in. It was so very weak.

It felt desire—it had the coherence for that, at least—and the desire to feel rage stirred its being like a breath over still water, driving it again and again at those brilliant knots of lightening that thought and moved upon the world and planned and remembered, heedless of the blessings they relied upon so utterly. It drove itself against those bright nodes, pouring itself over and between the obstacles of the Earth, cringing against the touch of the sun and the wind.

If it could, it would feel fear, and the sole answer to fear was power. The desire for power drove it over and between the hostile talons of the world, for it was so very, very weak.

* * *

"Well, no plagues yet," Bobby announced from his ancient and dust-covered desktop. There was a small spiderweb spanning the gap from the CRT monitor to the box, which he had left in place so he'd have something more interesting to watch than the status bar. "The demonic omens are nothing out of the ordinary for these days, though it looks like something's about to go down in Memphis."

"How 'bout Indianapolis?"

"Getting to that. Big fat normal on weather anomalies, but the fire department's been busy. There's just been two actual fires, your usual exploding gas ranges and oily rags, but people are reporting smoke all over the city. Complaining about smells."

"You think they're seein' demon smoke," Dean summarized.

"That could fit. But it don't all add up, if it is—the last I know civilians sighted demon smoke was right after Devil's Gate, demons swarming out every which way scouting for suitable hosts, omens going wild. Overpopulation is what that was. This…they're not setting anything off, and in a major city, there's plenty there _to_ set off."

Dean slapped down a page of notes on virgin sacrifice in disgust. "Demons're just floating around, what, streaking? That some kind of scare tactic? They're gonna get wrote off as a crappy radiator."

"Well, it does fit with what happened with Sam," Bobby mused.

Dean riveted his attention on him like a duck dog waiting for the gunshot.

"It's stupid," Bobby explained.

* * *

Dean slumped in a chair, listlessly smudging Sam with a rolled up newspaper and smoke from a bowl of anise seed, garlic, dried carnations, chili powder, something imported called southernwood, oregano, and tree sap, all smoldering slowly. Finding a compatible ritual to recall a living soul still within the body had turned out to be slow going, and since they hadn't been getting anywhere on the Marbas angle, Bobby had left Dean to smoke the evil out.

It gave him something to do with his hands.

Dean had suggested he just take some dreamroot, dive into Sam's head, and yank him back to the land of the living, since that had worked so well on the Krueger-boy job, but Bobby had pointed out that, even if they had any dreamroot to brew, Sam might not even be home to get to; they'd tried scrying for him with the big brass-and-quartz demon-finder, but his spirit wasn't putting out enough energy for it to pick up. It wasn't like his condition was deteriorating, either. Sam's pulse was a steady 55 beats per minute, his eyes were moist, and his mouth even stayed shut on its own when they didn't have the tube in.

Whoopie. Great work, Sam.

He set down the de-hexing herbs when they burned away, and stood to shift Sam's position on the sofa—pull his neck straight, flex his legs, flatten out any clothes wrinkles he might be lying on. He spotted a brown smudge in the crease of Sam's left elbow and cursed to himself.

"What now?" Bobby asked, lifting his head from a three-ring binder of dubious astral science from the 1980's.

"Gimme a sec," Dean muttered, and jogged out to the car to retrieve his EMF meter. From a crack in the porch eaves, little brown bats were creeping out into the dusk. Moths cracked against the bug light, and his boot squelched in a mud puddle.

"Wipe yer feet," Bobby called the instant Dean poked his head back in the door. "I'm not kidding."

Dean grudgingly smeared mud on a mud towel, swept across the room, and pointed the meter at the bloodstain he'd missed on Sam's arm. "Whoa, hey," he exclaimed. A few of the LEDs flickered, and he untangled one of the earbuds to listen to the squeal. There was a throb in the electric tone, rapid and accelerating. "Bobby—some kind of residual." Dean almost waved him over, but aborted the motion when he remembered that books on the floor and wheelchairs don't mix. "There's a pattern. You got a recorder I can check for EVP—huh." His face fell as he swung the meter away from Sam. The reading held constant, the same faint warble at five feet as at two. "Is there any ambients in here I should know about?"

"How'd you calibrate that thing?" Bobby grunted. "Let me see."

Dean tossed the meter over. "The tone cuts off pretty wide to catch the low frequencies, so there could be wave interference."

"What's that, sleep states?"

"Yeah, catch Casper while he's snoozin'. One time me and Sam did a haunting at a thrift shop—ghost was tied to her wedding dress. And the store had twelve of the things. You shoulda seen his face—just freakin' out about burning people's dreams or something."

Bobby frowned at the meter. "Dean, I don't think this is picking up anything of mine. Back off a couple steps."

Dean obeyed. "Wait, what?"

"Now come back over."

Dean's jaw twitched. "It's me, isn't it."

The meter brightened again as he approached. Bobby passed it back.

"Damnit," Dean sighed, and listened to the earbud again. The warble was faster now, and he discovered, as he pressed his fingers to his throat, that it matched his pulse. "Worked fine in Iowa—that was…four days ago?" Bobby gave him an eyeroll that said, don't look at me, and Dean counted on his fingers. "Four, five days. Regular old psycho doing demon-style murders. Then maybe I ran into, uh—"

"Sacrificial virgin blood?" Bobby suggested.

Dean set the meter down on Sam's chest and backed away, watching the lights dim. "If it's the blood, we'd both set it off."

"But you're conscious. You said whatever happened with that demon started when Sam touched the blood. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the two of you reacted differently."

A hot twinge flared up his spine from his gut, whispering, _kill, kill_. Dean stiffened and took a slow restraining breath. "Bobby…"

"Boy, you know as well as I do that if there's a baseline normal reactivity to paranormal energy, Sam sure as hell ain't it. Neither of you are."

Dean let the air run out his nose, watching his pulse slow slightly on the EMF meter. "Okay. You got a point."

"How about you take another crack at the summoning angle, see what direction that clusterfuck coulda gone off. I got a couple spirit-recall spells to check out; we can try 'em and if that doesn't work, I'll join you."

* * *

Two cups of lukewarm coffee later, Dean snuck a jealous glance at Bobby's research pile—three books open and a good stack shut, but everything was already bookmarked. Bobby had a sheaf of blank paper out and was blinking at his heavily abbreviated notes, scratching his beard with the back of his pen. Dean's pile was larger.

Pompous European magicians liked to document their work, which gave him something to work with. The Latin grammar hurt his head—he'd never gotten the trick of mentally reordering all the sentence parts like Sam had—but he recognized most of the word roots and the rest he could guess at. Turned out that most human blood sacrifices recorded in grimoires were successful because the failures were too deadly or embarrassing to make the books. From the fantastical range of warnings accompanying the rituals, he figured the catastrophes were as varied as they were mysterious. None exactly chicken soup for the soul.

He was certain, now, that the coven they'd interrupted had not been seeking a personal audience with Marbas. A demon that high up wouldn't bother to show unless they'd drawn out his seal on the altar, and if they did, he'd be pissed. And in the form of a lion, according to _Salomonica_. He'd probably turn everyone in the room into gemsbok, watch them bounce around in a panic, and eat them with Chianti, suicidal virgin or no.

Now that they weren't looking at actual hands-on meddling with Sam, what Dean and Bobby really wanted was a first-hand account by some bastard who had actually conjured plague dogs by the power of Marbas, so they could have some clue what the malfunction was. So far, no dice. An intelligent plague might've come in handy during, say, the Hundred Years War—biological weapons can get pretty tempting, especially if you're the witch in charge of protecting your tiny village from famine, and a horde of funny-talking soldiers stomps in and robs everyone—but he'd have to go to civilian historical records to find any incidents.

"What's a plague dog look like, anyway?" Dean grumbled.

Bobby looked up, surprised. "I was hoping Sam knew."

Dean felt his brain hiccup a bit. It must have showed on his face, because Bobby added, "Christ, boy, I didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus."

"I'll, uh, I'll try Google."

* * *

Bobby's computer was a classic. Unfortunately, classic computers don't age as gracefully as classic cars, so it was slow going.

He tried plague plus dog. Got Warcraft, Watership Down, and prairie dogs. Focused on historical plagues, checking Wikipedia for the big names—typhus, hemorrhagic plague, yellow fever, smallpox. Burrowed into the reference lists. Pulled a Sammy and bought some mind-numbing scholarly journal articles off JStor. Spent a solid hour banging his head against academic English, feeling like one of those little yappy dogs trying to point grouse in a field trial. He was the wrong tool for this job.

"Dude, at least with the papers they know how to write so people sometimes care what they're trying to say," he announced, riffling through a few fresh printouts of historical epidemiology. "I found some plagues with dogs. One's in kinda the middle of Nowhere, Germany—how's your German?"

"Better than my Norse," said Bobby sourly. "See what you can dig up in English."

"Right. Uh, there's this time in Del—uh, Delish. There was a bunch of rabies outbreaks that could've been our kinda thing. People dropping dead all over the place, knifing each-other, dogs breaking into kids' bedrooms. But those dogs were definitely corporeal, and that's not what Sam was talking about. Then there's Mantua, where a bunch of dogs died and then the plague hit, like it was spread by their ghosts. 1630. Place got invaded by some Habsburg asshole, and I'm thinkin' a Mantuan witch conjured the plague dogs and lost control of 'em."

"Witch could have worked for the ruling family and got assassinated," Bobby suggested. "What kind of plague?"

"Weird one, that's what got the researchers on it. They keep mentioning Ebola."

"Well, the only record I've got from Mantua is from the 1740's, but it could be worth a look if you don't find anything else. Anything from the Byzantine tradition?"

"On it. Really wish I knew what I was looking for, here. Nutjobs were probably siccing all kinds of monsters on each-other back then."

"Right with you there." Bobby waved a sheet of notes at him. "Go make up a bowl of this, breathe in the smoke, and do the incantation seven times. Hopefully that'll clear up whatever that blood did to you."

"What about Sam?" Dean demanded, taking the paper.

"Well, if you can get him to say the incantation, be my guest," said Bobby, rolling his eyes. "I've got five things to look over that should do more good than harm. Now go take care of yourself before you start foaming at the mouth and kill us all with the Red Death."

"F—," Dean said, freezing. Plague, that was what this whole thing had been about. If him and Sam—if interrupting the ritual had _changed_ him and Sam—and it had— "F—. Okay." He unfolded the wrinkles he'd accidentally crushed into the paper, and headed for the kitchen. He groaned as he opened the nearest cupboard. Bobby's herb collection only made sense to Bobby.

* * *

There was something that had power without light, and it was not itself.

It contemplated this new thing as best it could, having no form to restrain its thoughts or channel its perceptions: the thing was large and motile. It neither grasped the world nor parted the world against its path; instead this thing filtered and churned between the warp and weft of the air. The thing gave it shelter from the sun, but it found the shade empty of riches, like the world was dying in the thing's wake.

It knew that it itself was something that could die, but could not contemplate an existence other than death. It was tired of mysteries.

"Well."

A word descended on it.

"Well, well," spoke the thing, or howled, or crackled. The ideas carried, with their grammar and texture, and it longed to still itself to listen, but it had no form with which to bind itself. The thing's words, it observed, were full of menace and contempt. The thing coiled above it and spoke again, throbbing with amusement. "Aren't you gonna ask me if I'm your mother?"

It could not feel shame or offense or fear, but it objected to its nakedness before the thing. It tired of its lightlessness. It bridled at its own weakness in the face of power, and the desire for power drove it at a slender spark bound in earth and fire and water, and this spark, once so far beneath its notice, was too weak to repel its invasion.

At last it meshed itself in flesh, curled its being around a brilliant spark of beauty and snuffed it in its jealousy.

It felt. It felt stilled, half-born. It reveled.

It saw above itself a blackness like a swarm, and the fear and horror that it felt in flesh drove it from the swaying head of a grass stalk with all the speed its host's wings could provide.

* * *

After huffing another bowl of burning herbs like the Delphian Oracle or maybe just a desperate crackhead, and very carefully intoning a Greek nursery rhyme seven times, Dean didn't feel much different besides dizzy. That could have been the cloves. But the EMF had stopped picking up his heartbeat, so Bobby was happy.

Sam was still out.

Dean had had no luck uncovering anything that could have been the template for the Indianapolis coven's actual incantation, so they were left, in the terms of TV medical drama at the darkest point in the episode, with treating the symptoms.

Bobby had anointed Sam with Chrism oil, talking Greek, Greek, Greek, Samuel Winchester, Greek, Greek, Greek, and closing with, "Now wake yourself the hell up, idjit, your brother's going nuts." No dice, but the oil smelled way better than the stuff Dean had just inhaled.

Rite number two had involved shocking Sam with two nine-volt batteries and laying little candles over his chakras.

After that did nothing, Dean had copied a weird pentacle onto the floor and laid Sam in it, and done a smaller one nearby and put Sam's laptop in that. Then he'd waited, finger poised above the power button, for Bobby to finish two separate no-short-cuts old-school broad-spectrum exorcisms and a conjuration he'd composed himself. The idea was to exploit the mystical bond between Sam and his most prized possession for sympathetic magic—reboot Sam by proxy of the Dell. Turned out Sam liked M. C. Escher for his desktop background, every freaking program had separate password protection, and Sam and his laptop were not as close as he'd lead Dean to believe.

Rite four had creeped Dean out like nothing else. Bobby had read the Requiem for the Dead over Sam, he and Dean had eulogized him—awkward _and_ painful—and they'd sprinkled him with dirt from one of the few spots in the yard that wasn't impregnated with broken safety glass. After five minutes of staring down at Sam's still face with his eyes half-open, not moving, not tracking, Dean had dug out the Shop Vac and hastily cleaned all the dirt off. Then they'd poured water on him and tried another re-baptism.

Rite five would be a kind of recall ritual, essentially sending up a smoke signal that said, "Sam, you moron, your body's over here. Come on back." Problem was, with him and Sam being actively hunted by angels, demons, and Satan, they couldn't use anything that would call Sam specifically. This was where "more good than harm" got a little shady.

By now, Dean admitted to himself as he drew yet another unfamiliar diagram on the living room floor, they were working on the assumption that the exiting demon had dragged Sam's soul out along with. What the sonofabitch was doing to Sam—what it had been doing to him for who knows how long—how and why the thing had even managed to squeeze past Sam's tattoo in the first place—there was nothing here to kill, so Dean tried not to think about it. He just hoped Sam was ghosting around loose somewhere, otherwise they might as well roll over and wait for Lucifer to respawn him. Can't have the shiny new car missing the upholstery, after all.

The preparations would take the rest of the night and the following morning, so Dean had reinstalled Sam on the couch, fed him, and done the chores of caring for a comatose person that meant the ICU nurses really, really deserved a friendly smile after the fact.

They had a Ouija board ready to interview any spirits their ectoplasmic chum bomb might draw in, and diagrams picked out to force the sneaky ones to manifest. Dean already had an idea of how to salt the house down into a series of chutes, with lengths of rebar serving as cold-iron gates. They'd need at least fifty pounds of salt for all of it, and plenty of food and water in case it took more than a week and a poltergeist went to town on the plumbing.

If any demons showed up, he'd shoot them with the Colt. Since the Rising of the Witnesses, Bobby had developed a plan and a half to disperse a mob of ghosts, which they'd execute once they got Sam back. They had what bases they could think of covered, but no solid info, because to their knowledge no one had ever been stupid enough to hang a blinking fluorescent "Lost Souls Drink Free" sign on a place and not get the hell out of the state.

Maybe they had both gone a little crazy.

* * *

#

* * *

I think I stole the "didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus" line from one of Refur's fics. Hail, Refur.

Pretty much all the magic and history in this chapter, I pulled out of my hind end, but a lot of kitchen spices do have origins in European folk medicine, of which witchcraft is an outbranch.


	4. Fire in the Hole

In the morning, Bobby greeted him with eggs, coffee, and toaster waffles, which made Dean feel like a total prick, getting cooked for by a guy in a wheelchair. "Need you to head into town and pick up a few things," Bobby announced, passing him a list after they'd been fueled and caffeinated. "Oh, and grab a tarp for your Chevy. The ranch down the way has a lamb we're gonna need."

Dean wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "Lamb, as in…"

"As in a wooly Bambi."

"Oh, okay," said Dean, swallowing. _Witches, man._ Well, what did he expect.

* * *

Dean's spine was prickling and his palms were damp against the wheel as he returned to the Yard with his burdens. The windows were open. The lamb had spilled piss and turds all over the tarp in the back seat, and it lay disconsolately in the footwell, occasionally kicking its bound hooves or letting out a deafening, throaty "MWAAAAA!"

It had trim dark fur on its legs and face, and its slotted brown eyes had no whites to them. It flinched from his hand.

He swung up to the house and threw the Impala into park. Bobby had painted a buttload of sigils on the front door and windows in the time he'd been gone; usually, avoiding notice was an important part of staying safe from supernatural creeps, but with this plan, all bets were off. He spotted kimiyah around the lower doorjams in grease pencil, three sealed ofuda booklets duck-taped to the wall and door, a lumpy schematic of a gateway dotted with Hebrew and occult letters, and everywhere huge scowling eyes in charcoal and chalk. No prayers to archangels this time. Dean thought of all the times he and Sam had invoked Michael in the course of an exorcism or blessing and snorted to himself.

Standing at the passenger door, he silently apologized to the lamb before hauling it, fifty pounds baaing and struggling, up to the porch, where it scrambled backward on its knees and elbows until its rump jammed up against the wobbly rail.

It quivered when he returned to the porch loaded with shopping bags of canned food and jugs of water.

Bobby had evidently taken his van on his own shopping trip, because there was a white chicken in a cat carrier on the kitchen table. _Clavicula Salomonis_ was open to the plates on pentagrams, the ones they didn't normally use because hunters just don't tend to summon and command spirits. On the chicken cage sat the big glass bowl that Bobby had put popcorn in sometimes when Dean and Sam were kids.

"Where do you want the rutabaga?" Dean called, setting the bags down on the counter with a thud, and pulling out the spring water. Absopure, only the finest for gray necromancy.

Bobby skid-turned into the hall from a back room. "Bout time you got back. Table's good; get over here, I got some stuff needs lifting."

The back room might have been a study or a den or whatever they called rooms that didn't have beds or plumbing in them, and it was crowded with cabinets, salvaged metal-working tools, and stuff like the demon-finder, which still stood on the big desk, poised over a map. Bobby had shoved some trunks out of one corner, revealing a squat iron tube, mounted on a swivel and filmed with rust, with blurred letters around the side, and a rounded back end—"Holy shit, is that a howitzer?" Dean demanded, hopping over an ammo chest to kneel by the thing. The wood was dry and brittle, but the metal was sound, and the fuse port would be fine with a few scrapes from a .22 wire brush.

"Naw, just a mortar," Bobby replied, smiling. "We'll need that out front. Don't forget to lift from the legs."

"Screw you," said Dean cheerfully, and cleaned the artillery piece to his chest with a grunt.

* * *

Sam had been comatose for thirty hours.

At thirty three hours, the sun was just inching westward, and the lamb hadn't moved from its spot crammed into the corner of the house and the porch rail. Dean had carved the rutabaga from Safeway into a crude bombshell and stuffed it with summoning herbs, gunpowder, and the long fuse from a pack of firecrackers. He recognized some of the combinations with a vague feeling of _wrong turn, do not touch, do not combine bleach and ammonia:_ coriander, celery leaves, nightshade, hemlock. Then Bobby had had him bleed the rooster and mix up something based on Sam's horoscope to help narrow down the spirits they would attract: blood for the Sun, pepperweed for Taurus, sulfur for Mars. He didn't like the sulfur, but they had a lot of it, and it made sickening sense for Sam.

The same mix of herbs went into the charcoal grill, just inside the open door with a fan on it to direct the fumes outside. Spring water went in the big bowl, half-filling it.

"You got any rope?" Dean asked, tugging on a screw eye under the porch eaves that had probably been installed to hold one of those pre-filled plastic flower baskets. It still felt pretty strong.

"Try the small garage," Bobby suggested, not looking up from a small wall mirror in his lap that was getting a fairly realistic grease-pencil scorpion on its face. Dean glanced into the house at the salt lines and rebar he'd assembled, which surrounded or incorporated four different pentacles for summoning or commanding spirits, and reminded him of an airport, or maybe a slaughterhouse, with all the fences they'd put up.

The small garage had a cargo strap, which would work just fine. Dean made two loops in it, a forearm apart, and fixed it into the eye on the porch.

"We ready for this?" he asked.

Bobby held up his portrait of a scorpion. It looked fierce. Two claws, eight legs, four beady little eyes. "All finished. For whatever this is all worth. Take your last good look at the sky, boy, 'cause it might be a while before any of us can step out there for more than a second and live."

There was a slow coal fire in the belly of the grill, waiting for herbs. The mortar was loaded and primed. A couple extra bags of salt sat just inside the door. Dean cut off a length of cargo strap and approached the shivering lamb, which rallied, baaed, and tried to struggle to its feet. He looped the strap once around its throat and pulled, knuckles pale with the force, until the lamb slumped and stopped kicking.

Working quickly, he dragged the lamb by the strap to the steel eye, slashed through the thin skin behind its ankles, strung it into the air by its hind feet, and cut its throat into the bowl of spring water. The lamb revived for a second, just before the blood loss put it out for the last time, and Dean automatically wrapped himself around the small body as it twitched in death, the knees banging against his temple, blood dribbling neatly down its gaping jaw to splash into the bowl. Bang on target.

Head-down restraint was always a lot more fun to work with than the rack.

Bobby was looking at him oddly when he came in with the bowl of blood and water, and Dean realized he was sweating, and the liquid in the bowl rippled in his hands. A twisted grin squirmed its way onto his lips, and so there'd be something to match it, he said, "Sam's cooking that thing, not me."

"I'm sure," Bobby said.

Drops of bloody water went on the grill, into the mortar, and onto Sam's forehead. Dean lit the fuse and dashed clear, hands over his ears. The old cannon barked and rocked on its pins, spitting the hollow rutabaga high over the salvage yard until it burst in a flare of black-powder smoke, spreading herbs and ash on the high winds. Bobby threw the herbs into the grill and turned on the fan, and they settled in behind the salt lines to wait.

* * *

#

* * *

What Dean does to the lamb here is a hybrid of Halal/Kosher slaughter and misapplied old job skills. Threading a rope between the shin and the Achilles tendon is a great way to hold an animal still--after it's already dead. Exsanguination is an approved method of euthanasia--after the animal is anaesthetized. He's DOING IT WRONG.

As I recall, the herbs for this part were selected from The Magus at sacred-texts dot com, with many Google and Wikipedia searches to get less antiquated versions of the various plant names. (Just making sure you know how hard I worked.) A lot of the plants used in black magic were potent neuroactive poisons like deadly nightshade (belladona) and henbane (like locoweed, only from Europe.) So you don't really want the smoke accumulating in the house.

I also looked up Sam's horoscope. Classic, classic Taurus, with influence from the Sun and Mars, hence a Taurus herb, the blood of a white cock, and sulfur.


	5. Industrial Grade Mojo

It disliked fleeing. It was proud, but it was also prudent, and as it had no home to return to, and no strength to repel the other of its kind, it fled, without purpose or understanding, cursing its misfortune to belong to a species of cannibals.

For it had the impression, from the fury with which the black swarm pursued it, and from what little it could perceive of itself, that the two of them would kill each-other if they met.

Whenever the dark thing spoke to it, jeering and threatening, it was more articulate than itself, and it increasingly resented this: it was so very tired of its own weakness and ignorance, and frustration drove it into ever larger and stronger hosts, which were ever more likely to slip loose.

Engulf a spark large enough, and spread itself within a sufficient volume of blood, it thought, and it would have understanding.

It now had command of a flying thing, which offered it an expansive and detailed view of all the world touched by the sun and the stars, a view painted in refracted light on the host's very flesh. It found the sense of sight pleasing and efficient, and the tangled spark it had smothered within itself burned and coiled against its bottled formlessness in interesting patterns, far more interesting than its first or even its third vehicles. But the flying host was not what it wanted: it was too small, too weak and ephemeral, and though the speed of its passage upon the air was useful, it was an unfamiliar way of travel. The spark of the host had yielded to it grudgingly, but it believed it could subdue a stronger one, provided the dancing of the spark echoed its own nature.

A scent reached it, and it made the host wheel to the West.

A scent. But this was not the host's own sense of scent, not the burst of air on exposed nerves of a brain—this was a call upon its own very sense of self, the smoke-writ testament of labor bent in its own direction, of blood burnt, elements compounded and beauty demolished in its honor, a delicious and flattering pull.

Or perhaps not in its honor. If something were truly to call to it, it could not imagine what its own totems might be.

Air purled at the corners of its host's wings as it contemplated another change. It felt shame in this host. It had not felt shame in its previous hosts, but now, with room in the host's blood to ponder and think on itself, it felt shame at its past, and balked at answering the summons of blood and sulfur, clothed in flesh of which it was ashamed—but the speed the winged thing offered its new-set journey was too great to set aside.

It perceived the blackness of the other below it, churning within a large creature of flesh which should have blazed hot and flashing with coiled lightening but was instead muted and smothered. It found itself yearning for such power. The other waved an appendage at it, in what it supposed must be a gesture of contempt.

Its own host slipped clean and fast above the surface of the world, and the itch of pride drove it westward, racing the other for the source of the smoke.

* * *

The EMF meter had squealed non-stop. Dean had turned it off awhile ago, and since then he and Bobby had downed a quarter bottle of Jack. Bobby hoped it would last, because he had no intention to sit through this madness sober.

He'd wondered, going into this, if they'd attract just the few spirits that he could predict—ghosts he'd missed from the junked cars, any demons in range, and Sam—or if it would be Ghost Woodstock, with unmoored spirits pouring in from the four winds. Every hunter, if he lived long enough, got some unsolved case to blame on an unmoored spirit; it was like a doctor saying a disease was idiopathic, it meant you sucked at your job and needed something to excuse yourself. But no one could ever prove they didn't exist.

And what do you know, they did.

Dean had one on the Fifth Pentacle of the Sun right now, sandwiched between the salt moats and a length of rebar. The ghost was free to leave through the exit chute, but Dean was talking to it. Funny thing was, it was talking back.

"No." It had a heavy accent and a low velocity bullet hole in its collarbone. Stood maybe 5'6", dressed in a fashionable buckskin kilt with a panel of machine-neat porcupine quill embroidery, clean-shaven, armed with a flintlock rifle, and in his late thirties. It spoke carefully, but it seemed to understand Dean just fine, even quirked a smile at some of his inane pop culture references, which meant it had been learning after death. "I will tell him," said the wandering spirit. For an instant, its image blurred at the edges, and a wind ruffled the papers in the room. Bobby cursed and tightened his fist around his sawed-off, but the spirit did nothing more. "Be wary. More are coming. God willing, you may survive this, and be grateful you began this summoning with a humble heart, or otherwise I would have put an end to you."

"Thanks for the concern," Bobby told it. The spirit nodded, strode off the pentacle into the exit chute, and disappeared. Dean lifted the rebar that closed the salt moats at the bottom of the open window and replaced it after a count of three, then stumped back to the door to let another one in.

This one didn't even look human when it yielded to the pentacle.

Just a silent dust-devil, bearing no wind, wisps like rotten hands scraping at the ceiling, writhing, contorting. Dean slowly shuffled the Ouija board half-way into the salt ring, keeping his fingers out of the danger zone. Bobby gave him a nod and raised the sawed-off.

"Do you know me?" Dean demanded, speaking slowly. Bobby breathed through his nose. He didn't think this was Sam. He hoped it wasn't Sam; they just had to be sure.

Dean eased his left hand onto the indicator and waited, crouched like a spooked cat, for the wraith to respond.

"Point at the Y if you know me," Dean repeated, demonstrating. The wraith churned, like a loose demon, but more translucent. A screaming face, just a distorted mouth and two hollows for eyes, bloomed at its base and swirled its way up the column of shadow to splash against the ceiling like a breaker on a beach. It paused in its spinning and reversed direction, tendrils of smoke splitting off and lashing against the confines of the salt and iron. Dean hissed.

"Time out?" Bobby snapped, leveling the gun.

"No, I'm good, gimme a second," Dean grunted.

"Damnit, boy." Bobby imagined storming out of that chair, grabbing Dean by the ear, and yanking him backward.

He heard the pointer scrape against the board, and watched Dean yank his hand out of the circle and lift the first exit gate. The spirit didn't move until Bobby flashed the mirror with the Fifth Pentacle of Mars at it, snapping, "Go peacefully and with all haste to a place empty of mankind and remain there." When Dean cleared the second gate, it flowed out the window and scattered in the sun. A howl rattled the shingles.

"That was trippy," Dean remarked, shaking his left hand. Bobby could see blisters in the shape of thin, elongated fingers wrapping around the back of it. Dean pressed the flat of an iron knife against the area, and nodded to himself as he lifted it after a second or two. "Clears right up." He was grinning that Peter Pan grin that always meant he was so far in over his head he couldn't see the surface. "Anything new for the old journal?"

"Just that I can take everything we thought we knew about the afterlife and use it for toilet paper," Bobby grumbled, wheeling over to the refrigerator for ice cubes. He managed to dunk two in Dean's tumbler just before the Jack went in. "Don't give me that look. We've got God knows how many ghosts to interview, and if I can't kick 'em all off my property at the end of it, I want enough liquor left to die good and drunk, that okay with you?"

Dean gave him the Asparagus Face that Bobby remembered from when the kid was ten.

* * *

Hailey was seven years old, in blue jeans and rubber sandals, with tears on her face, and an empty leash and dog collar in her hand. Her father scooped her into a warm hug at the door.

"I lost Ernie," she wailed into his shoulder.

"Aw, honey," he sighed, smoothing her wispy red hair. "It's okay. It's okay, he'll find his way home. He'll get tired of chasing jackrabbits and come on home, all right?"

"He didn't," Hailey snuffled, riding out the sobs. "He didn't see a jackrabbit. His eyes went funny and he just pulled out of his collar."

"Honey, it's gonna be okay. How about you go lie down, and I'll call the pound and have them look for him, all right?"

Hailey pressed the leash and collar into his hand and staggered into her bedroom to curl up under the covers in a shuddering ball of helpless misery.

"I knew I shouldn't have let her walk him alone," her father muttered, wandering into the kitchen where his wife stood stirring a pan of curry.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Earnhardt slipped his leash," he sighed. "He never does that. He's perfect on a lead; I don't get it."

"He's a greyhound, that's what they do," she said. "How's Hailey?"

"Traumatized. Ernie'd better just get lonely and come home, 'cause I am really not looking forward to taking her to the shelter."

"He's a greyhound," she said again, warningly. "He might not care."

* * *

Each new host had given it a gift. First it was form, then thought and more thought, reflection, planning. This host gave it purposes, two.

It was alone:

It would find its kin.

The other dark thing wanted to toy with it and kill it, so that was not one of its kin. It sought them.

It dashed over the rocks and grass on the fine-skinned feet of its host, clinging with all its will to the chained lightening within that flesh, that flashed and blazed against its self, flaring in harmony with its own nature. For it began to have acquaintance with its own nature: it was proud and prudent, stubborn and starved, ardent and obsessive, patient at rest but stutter-fast in battle, bold and powerful in its mind. It coiled itself in harmony with the dancing of the light of beauty it held half-smothered within, riding and riding as the host's feet pounded swifter than swift over scrub and scree.

But all was not right:

It knew not its name.

This host was the first host it had known that bore a name, and it itself had none. With knowledge of its name, it thought, perhaps it could understand its place upon the Earth beneath the hot sun and the harsh and hostile wind, sheltering in stolen flesh from the flashing fangs of the world. The desire for a name drove it ever faster in its quest for kin, for what more likely kin, and who better to divine the name of an unnamed thing, than those who summon them?


	6. Soul, Self

"Damnit," Bobby snarled, catching a snatch of movement from the window. There was nothing living in the yard, not with the dead, visible and invisible, crowding around so thick the white rooster on the table had gone wall-eyed in fright.

Dean was ushering a little Irish boy with horse's hooves through the chute and sending him away. Wandering souls changed after death.

"We got demons," Bobby announced. With all the salvage lying around, a corporeal enemy would have plenty of cover; God help them if it had a gun. They needed to stick this out in the house, where the spirits had relatively free passage; salt lines were easy to lay in clear ground, but impossible to expand in hostile ground, and falling back to the elevator and the panic room would be a serious setback if they ever wanted to get ahold of Sam.

At least he couldn't say he'd gone cowardly in his old age.

He switched the salt gun out for the Colt, and threw another handful of unholy herbs and lamb's blood into the grill.

"I'll reinforce the back lines," Dean announced, drawing the Knife and heaving up a sack of sidewalk salt.

"Put that down, idjit," snapped Bobby. "If you'd done the lines wrong the first time, we'd be long dead. The traps were fine last I checked; this house isn't falling down around our ears _that_ fast." To tell the truth, since he'd come back to the house and Jo and Ellen had installed the ramps and supervised the contractors for the elevator—and that was a wad of cash he hoped never got traced his way—after they'd all left and the house was empty and creaking, he'd stared up at the ceilings he couldn't reach and begun to catalog all the stress points and water damage that threatened his sigils. It was one of many daily rituals that kept a solitary man sane.

"We could scry for it, snipe it—but we'd need the name, shit," Dean muttered, dropping the salt to crouch by the window. "Wish guns'd had decent range in 18-whatever. Maybe we could tell the ghosts to attack it."

Bobby blinked and checked his memory. Yep, he'd heard that one right.

It was a nightmare scenario come to life—trapped in the house, dead and demons prowling the yard, his life and soul and those of his friend shielded only by half-coherent folk knowledge and the ramblings of 10th century crackpots and charlatans. It really wasn't so bad, though.

"Dean, you're crazier'n your daddy ever was. Let's give it a try."

* * *

Hunters didn't do this.

Ever. Hunters might hold a séance and try to lay a spirit to rest the Sammy way, but that was really pushing it. They didn't burn hemlock and nightshade and sulfur after sacrificing a lamb to nobody in particular, and they really, really didn't try to give orders to the ghosts that answered the summons.

Hell, maybe witches didn't, either. Ghosts were pains in the ass.

This one looked pretty solidly human and didn't talk like a broken record or scream like she'd somehow managed to get herself racked _on Earth_—how did spirits even do that to themselves?—but she was going to drive him up the wall.

"Do I look like a dirty Irishwoman?" she shrilled, stamping her little black boot. She wore one of those gigantic bonnet things with fluffy bows in weird places and an ugly print dress that went all the way up her throat.

"Lady, are you even listening to yourself?" Dean demanded. "There's a freakin' demon outside! You probably saw it! That's pure evil, and you're up in arms about a little cross-denominational spit-swapping?"

She fumed. She was almost as good a fumer as Sammy at fifteen.

"Look," said Bobby, sounding a bit pained. "The Latin, the exact words—that's not so much what's important. If you have faith—and I assume you do—"

"I walk ever in the fear of Our Lord Jesus Christ," she snapped.

"Uh-huh. You should be able to, er, rebuke the demon."

Her eyes got wide. Newbie at their first salt-n-burn wide, key in the ignition for the first time wide. "And they shall cast out demons in His name," she breathed, and turned slowly to gaze out the shuttered window.

"Yeah," Dean added. "I mean, if a Catholic can do it…"

She snapped out of her spiritual epiphany to scowl at him. "We are all children of the Lord," she said icily. "Though some of us are nearer His Truth than others."

"Great," said Dean. "Happy hunting." He lifted the exit gates, one after another, and gave her a mocking bow on the way out. "Damn racist ghosts," he muttered. "Hey, what's with all the language lessons and memorizing exorcisms if it's all about a state of mind?"

Bobby looked sour and constipated. "Recreating the original Roman Catholic exorcism ritual is sort of a, a stopgap. For when you don't actually have faith. In God, as such."

"Oh," said Dean, not sure what he wanted to do with that.

"But there's faith in the church involved," said Bobby, and was that a little defensiveness Dean heard? "Faith that, if it worked for them, it'll work for us, you know?"

"Yeah," said Dean, thinking of how now, not only did he not have faith, but he had concrete evidence that any faith he might have briefly entertained was deeply misplaced. "Better give those poor deluded monks a toast or two."

Bobby turned rigidly away and stared at the refrigerator.

Dean lifted the entrance gate for a second, keeping an eye out the door for a demon with a sniper rifle, and checked the visibility pentacle. This spirit was distorted, twisted—too many arms and legs, like something torn apart and sewn together, no voice but a constant muffled groaning, collarbones collared as one, blinded and hobbled (he'd been such a twisted bastard—his skin was crawling) but no.

It was a man and a woman, ramming up against each-other, blind with bliss, groaning with anticipation. World's Longest French Kiss, right there. Dean let out a breath and smiled.

He felt like a bit of a bastard—non-twisted, live human bastard—for interrupting them, but whatever. Love and war. "Uh, dude?" he said, resisting the urge to reach over the salt and tap the smoky forms on the shoulders. "Sweetheart?"

The woman slitted one eye open and moved to run kisses up and down the man's throat, while he ran blurry fingers through her hair and nibbled her ear.

Dean snapped his fingers a couple times, and they both opened their eyes, though the woman kept running her hands over the man's hips and wriggling. Damnit, this was so not fair. "You guys notice any demons running around?"

Cow-like indifference. The man wrapped a possessive arm against the woman's shoulderblades and pressed her close, and they leaned toward each-other again.

"Hey! Talking to you, jeez!"

They broke off abruptly and stared at him. Dean dimly recalled an old story about some unfortunate Greek dude who interrupted a pair of snakes that were going at it, and bad things had happened to him. Their eyes were flat and unblinking now.

"There's a demon outside, it wants to kill us," he told them. "Probably not too crazy about you two, either. I want you to exorcise him or chase him off."

They stared, and flickered.

"Okay, you guys were really hot, but now you're just really creepy."

Too much eye contact. He shuffled his feet.

"Look, I'm sorry for watching! It's not like she's wearing anything, what was I supposed to do?"

Their hands tightened on each-other's shoulders, but Dean got the feeling they wished they were crushing him to death.

"Could you guys just help a little? For love?"

Bobby snickered.

"Shut up," said Dean, face warm. But then he heard a throaty growl and a warbling shriek, and looked back to see the man bitch-slap the woman so hard she bounced against the border of the salt line, back smoking. She kneed him in the jewels and he scratched his nails down her breast, and there was nose-punching and hair-pulling and eye-gouging, as they screamed at each-other all the while.

"Oops," Dean said.

"All right, floor show's over," said Bobby. He held up the scorpion mirror, and the two spirits hissed, _hissed_ with fangs and everything, and clung to each-other. Things just couldn't make up their minds. "Go peacefully and with all haste to some place empty of mankind and remain there."

Dean lifted the exit gates, and the spirits continued to manifest, staring narrow-eyed at him, long after they had flickered out the window.

* * *

It walked wary, waiting and watching, pacing and sidling, stretching its self-senses and its host's far-reaching eyes over the surface of the land, around and between the obstacles of the Earth, over rock and valley, between great tree-masses of steel and glass and oil that smoked of death and disuse, seeing shades.

They prowled around a house like the host's home, fleshless lightning self-chained or whirling into formlessness, with burning hands fumbling in the air, drawn, like itself, to the smoke of blood and beauty ruined without reason. One shade drifted near, and it snapped at it in its host's way, with bright teeth. The host's skin chilled, its self churned in the host's blood, and the shade flared and fled in madness that looked like prudence. It itself trotted between the great steel mountains on slender sleek-skinned feet, the host drooling for blood, it yearning deeper than the host could understand, seeking.

Steel struck it. It howled with the host, spinning to face the other's smothering dark in a high-born host with hands that could grip and strike, gripping a steel thing stained with itself in blood. It snarled, feeling the host's heart churn its bottled formlessness as they crouched tense for battle, and the other bared its own host's blunt teeth in mockery. _Aren't you going to ask me if I'm your mother?_

The other pressed upon the air with a hand, and it and its host flew and scraped and tumbled over the dust and scree, into the grip of the shades.

And the shades spoke to it, and it quailed.

"Exorciso te, omnis immundus spiritus—"

"Child of Satan, begone from this home and trouble not its inhabitants—"

"God's favor will not suffer one such as thee."

"Under the sun I condemn you, I raise my weapons against you—"

"For you have no place on the face of God's earth, and in God's name I banish you—"

It knew not the place the shades might command it to go, but in flesh it felt terror and fear, so it fled, racing on long legs between the mounds of steel and glass, far from the place of menace. Its host's legs were fleet, and the other was laughing.

Fleet indeed were the lunging legs of its sleekskinned host, and it turned the host's head over its shoulder, spying the shades behind it as it gained free ground with each panting breath and each twist of its host's heart, and so it slowed, and turned upon its flight, and charged, trailing its retinue, springing hard at the back of the other.

The other's host's back was broad and soft under its own host's swift-flying feet as it vaulted from it, leaving the other staggering and stumbling in the path of the shades.

It saw the home-house, saw the blood-dripping lamb dangling head down and tempting, saw the aureole of more shades, wandering and tame, saw the door, with a mark upon it which marked it as a door, and as such to be entered. It smelled the blaze of blood and sulfur, the smoke that had called it, and it lunged for the crack in the door, seizing entry, only to burn itself on the enmity of iron.

* * *

"Holy—!"

The hugest, skinniest living dog Dean had ever seen, burst through the door and recoiled against the first entrance gate. Make that huge, skinny, possessed dog—black eyes in a long muddy gray face, a hoarse yelp as its long legs strayed against the salt lines. "Plague dog, plague dog," he yelled, scrambling to his heels, arms spread wide.

Behind him, Bobby cocked the Colt. "Get it pinned and interrogate it," he ordered. Dean chanced a look back at him, incredulous. "I'm not kidding. If that's a plague dog, we gotta find out where it's been."

"Right," Dean muttered. He grabbed the entrance gate and hefted the rebar like a club. The demon dog tracked it, quivering as though ready to bolt—weird. He sidestepped toward the door and smacked its rump further into the chute, and it scuttled in, head hanging low, growling and snapping at the twisted old woman's ghost that stood over the visibility pentacle. She wailed, a quivering noise that mimicked the wind in a chimney, and spun confusedly in place. "Quiet," Dean snapped. "Gimme a second." He lifted the exit gate for an instant, and she dematerialized and slipped away. The dog balked, trapped.

A dog demon. Without the usual headgames, this exorcism might be positively easy.

The dog whimpered. Bobby had set up the scorpion mirror in its view, returning the symbol to the role it played in the center of his devil's traps, and it was hunching, ears flat to its neck, back arched up, tail tucked in so low it brushed against its own chest.

"Sam ever mention _how_ plague dogs come to be?" Bobby asked.

"Didn't get that far," said Dean, taking a deep breath. It was a bizarrely nonthreatening demon. They could kill it at will, it had no way of breaking itself out of the salt and iron, and it couldn't dredge his emotional sewer for shit to rub in his spiritual wounds. Which meant it had probably infected them both with Ebola already, but there was nothing much they could do about that.

It was staring at him. Deep, soulful doggy eyes that happened to be oil-black. Staring like it wanted something, like he was an amazingly lifelike man-shaped package of bacon bits. "Nice devil doggy. Uh, Bobby, since we're already up to our necks in the black stuff, we got any way to force the truth out of this thing?"

"None that I'd change my mind about. Use your imagination."

_Sorry, but that's not such a great idea anymore. _"Holy water?"

Bobby slapped a flask into his palm.

"Devil doggy." It was staring at Sam now, licking its chops with a thin pink tongue. "Hey!" He shook a drizzle at it, and it yelped, then recovered, curling its lips. Nice fangs. "Eyes off Sam." He stared it down, and it stared right back for almost a minute, not blinking. Then he came to his senses and realized that he was up against a _demon_, which could keep its host's eyes open long after they dried up into its skull, so he broke it off and did the two-fingers eyes-on-you move he'd always thought was bad-ass in late night action flicks. Didn't stop the dog from giving him bacon-bits eyes, though.

It whined. It whined, cut itself off, and swallowed, once, twice, pinned its ears back, and growled softly.

"What's that, Lassie? Are demons gonna play tug o'war with my guts in Hell? You gonna wall-slam me with your scrawny doggy paw? Oh, wait—you can't talk to me, 'cause you're a _dog._ Who'd you piss off to get that job, huh? I musta ganked or exorcised fifty of you suckers, and not one of those slimeballs was wearing anything less human than a circus freak with two tongues." He felt a sick grin coming on, and let it rise, watching for a reaction.

The dog was watching him intently, ears perked up, head cocked, and somehow looking vaguely affronted at his tone but intensely curious what the noises coming out of his mouth meant.

"I'm not sure he speaks English," Dean announced, deflating.

The dog narrowed its eyes and half-snarled at him.

"Hey, he's got a bitch-face just like Sammy," he remarked, and hefted the flask for another dose.

The dog beat him to it.

It stiffened, blinking the black in and out of its eyes, shuddered, and folded to the floor, pawing jerkily at its head. Its hind legs twitched and tipped it over, and it lay, gasping and shuddering, on the sigil, its eyes and its head twitching rapidly back and forth, cheekbone thumping against the boards.

"What the hell?" Bobby murmured, leaning forward and tightening his hand on the Colt.

A defective demon. Dean stared. That looked like no kind of offensive maneuver he'd ever seen. That looked _involuntary_, and, Hell, he'd never seen a demon so much as embarrassed, unless it was acting or getting dunked in Holy Water. But this thing, maybe it was some sort of half-formed, larval demon, some kind no one ever saw because they stayed out of the way of anyone with more faith than your average embittered preacher's kid.

In a flash he thought of Sam with blood on his hand and his eyes black, the thing inside him panicking, squeezing his nose shut as if to physically hold itself inside, until the tattoo kicked in and it burst out in a helpless roar. That thing hadn't seemed too calm and collected, either. Maybe demons had a break-in period before they got the hang of the whole possession deal. Maybe the two were the same one, it wasn't like you could ever identify a demon unless you had a rapport with it.

Of course, the one in the dog might be playing possum. It could be anyone.

Dean had a thought. A crazy, stupid thought, a real _oh, shit_ thought as he thought of Sam's intact protection sigil, and the two ways you could put a metaphorical ship into a metaphorical bottle. "Oh, shit," he said.

"You know what it's doing?" Bobby demanded.

"No, but," he muttered, "uh. Tell me I'm crazy, but what if what came out of Sam…_was_ Sam?"

Dean waited. It didn't take that long to call a guy a sick loco freak, but he hoped.

"Well, it would make things simpler," said Bobby slowly, dashing his hopes. "Explains the tattoo. Explains Sam not being in his body. Maybe explains the Mantua plague dogs, if the ritual discorporates the subjects. But this is no time to go making assumptions," Bobby warned him.

Don't make assumptions, _sure_. Assumptions kept his heart beating and his feet plodding down the road.

Dean remembered that horrifying, blood-spattered meeting with Chuck. _Your eyes were black_, he'd told Sam. And what do you know, Sam's on the wagon and sorry as a hooker in a nunnery, they're not even using hex bags, and _now_ their nightmare comes true. Only now it's just sad. If their usual luck is holding, Sam's a really pathetic demon, possessing a scrawny, ugly-ass dog, keeled over on the floor with what looked exactly like a painful vision. And Dean had been counting the seconds until he'd get to kill it.

He kept one eye on the door and one on the maybe-Sam demon-dog, and waited for whatever-it-was to blow over. "Let's find a way to check."

* * *

Ire of iron, scour of salt. Ire of iron, scour of salt. It had no running room. Steel struck, and it flinched away, snapping at a shade.

It saw two brilliant knots of beauty shining in lightning, muffled in beating flesh. It saw two high-born things with hands to grip and strike and stroke. It saw a seal underfoot and a seal shining in its eyes, ordering it to be humble. It chafed, but it was so very weak. It was humble, and it cowered in its host before the image and the names of an enemy it knew not but to fear.

It tired of fear, but the fear would not leave it. It tired of humility, and its disgust at its own weakness drove it to defiance in the face of threat and pain.

It heard a name. It meant nothing. Pain and enmity borne in water burned it.

It heard a name. One of the high-born hosts spoke to it, in words that echoed in the name it had heard, and it saw that it had a strange light, an odd rhythm to the writhing of its coils that made it quail within its host, even as the odd rhythm stirred and swirled in quarter harmony to its own nature. The high-born host was a thinking thing like itself, it realized, for it was mocking it. It bridled.

It heard a name, and the name thrice-struck rang thrice a thrice-turned gong within its self, and knowledge came with pain, pain with understanding, and its whole being shuddered with that of its host of which it had been so proud, because it knew—

—_shine, Sammy—_

—_shotgun—_

—_come back—_

That it was supposed to be Sam.

And Sam was supposed to be living.

* * *

#

* * *

Please review if you did or didn't see that coming. Just a Y for 'Duh, it was kinda obvious' or an N for 'Holy crap, that was out of the clear blue!' Pretty please?

On the show, it's been looking like they lost the Colt at the end of Abandon All Hope, but I'm giving Castiel some credit for saving a decent anti-demon weapon when he sees one. (Besides, I wrote this chapter months ago.)


	7. Call Sign

_That is not a happy dog,_ Dean thought, watching the demon try to merge with the floor, eyes squeezed shut.

The vision—seizure—Ebola-spreading procedure—whatever, was over, and the demon still hadn't given them any solid reason to go for the Colt yet. "Wish we had some kind of demon power meter," Dean muttered. If it really was as weak and pathetic a demon as it looked—and it really wasn't making a good showing in the power department—it might not actually be part of a devious infiltration plot.

It lifted its head at his voice, and slowly pulled to its feet. There was something different in its gaze now, something less drooly, more…guilty. Like it had piddled on a Hell-carpet or eaten the wrong demon's baby stash. Spilled Slurpie in the Car.

"Sam, that better not be you," Dean muttered.

The dog shivered, teeth clicking together, and tucked its tail far between its legs.

Dean stared it down again, and this time it looked away. "Was that a vision, demon-dog, or am I going nuts here?"

The dog grumbled and sat on its bony heels, still trembling. Then it perked its ears and stood again, blank black eyes intent on something by Dean's elbow as it scratched the floor near the saltline with a paw.

"What, this?" Dean asked, patting the Ouija board. "A second ago you don't understand English, now you can spell?"

The dog growled at him and scratched more urgently.

Bobby cleared his throat. "Don't mess up the salt," he warned.

"Yeah, okay, I think I got that," Dean snapped.

"No, really. It knocks the board out of your hands, it could put a gap in the line and slip right over."

Dean nodded, got a firm grip on the board, and pushed it gingerly across. The dog backed away, putting a paw to the board only when his hands were clear.

_S_, it wrote.

"Sam?" Dean coughed, blinking.

_Y._

Bobby cursed and muttered to himself.

"Shit," Dean hissed. "So, uh…"

_D E M_

"Yeah, you're a demon, I got that. That, uh, that really sucks."

_Y. Y Y Y Y Y…_

"Sorry, man."

_N. B O D Y ?_

"Fine, you're fine. Didn't even have to give you mouth-to-mouth. I just need some proof, uh, hang on a sec. Bobby?"

"Got my eye on him."

_O U T. D E M O N. G H O S T S._

"Yeah, we'll kill him later." Dean backed away from the demon—Sam—and grabbed the laptop. "Okay, doggie, what's the password for FireFox?"

The dog glared at him.

"What, you want me to ask you something you could just read out of my mind? No way, dude, suck it up."

_C A P_

"Cap," Dean muttered.

_N._

"N. Capn Crunch?"

_N. N N N N. C A P I T_

"Oh, shift bar. Just, uh, knock twice."

Scrape, scrape, went the dog's long gravel-worn claws on the floorboards. _R._

"Capital R."

_O S A L I T A. _The dog's paw scraped slowly over the floor, twice vertical, twice horizontal.

"The hell is that?"

"Pound sign," Bobby ground out.

"Okay, Rosalita, capital R, tic-tac-toe board."

_Y. _Scratch_-_scratch_. B L V D. 2 2. _Scratch_-_scratch_ S._

It was a street address, a Southwest street address, as in California. "Damnit, Sam," Dean muttered. It was like the kid was determined to wring as much misery out of his life as he possibly could, and it wasn't like either of them needed to try. "That it?"

_Y._ He and the dog waited tensely for FireFox to open. It did.

"Well, he knows what Sam knows," said Dean.

"Scry for Sam again," Bobby suggested. "I'll watch him."

When Dean reached the back room, the demon-finder, which they'd left wandering aimlessly the day before, was already pointing to the outskirts of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

* * *

The bright and strange-writhing lightening was Dean. That bright living beauty wrapped in sheltering flesh, that was Dean's soul or his mind or something. The blazing spark he himself smothered with his own being was a dog's spirit. Sam was dissolved in the dog's blood. The image of the scorpion ringed in terrible names was a Pentacle of Mars, which he and Dean and Bobby would use in devil's traps as an extra layer of control—he'd used to draw scorpions. He'd willingly stored the image and those names in his own mind, turning them over fondly as he theorized on the rules of their power, when now they leered savage and contemptuous with all the enmity of Earth and iron.

With the dog's eyes (dim and far-sighted) he watched as Dean sketched quickly on the floor, more terrible symbols, more of the world's ire and humankind's contempt. More cages.

Dean finished the new trap, heaved Sam's lightless body carefully into the center, pulled up Sam's shirt, and cut the tattoo with a knife. He poured a ring of salt around the trap, connecting to the other salt lines by a narrow bridge, and moved the iron bar and broke the dividing line to let Sam in.

Sam shivered through the dog, and crept slowly over the hot scouring scattered salt, claws clicking in the narrow lane, into the trap that leaned clammy and oppressive on his being. He sniffed at the body, listening to its slow, shallow breaths, smelling more salt, always salt, and nitro-solvent and smoke and blood.

Dean watched, expectantly, and Sam quailed as he realized he must leave the dog's flesh with its live and coiling spark that warmed his bottled formlessness, for his own flesh, empty of anything bright.

He loosed his grip on the dog's spirit and felt its force against him, felt his thoughts churn unanchored and uncaught on the abrasive air.

* * *

The dog tipped its head back and howled, a hoarse and shredded sound, as demon smoke—Sam's soul, Sam's soul was black and smoky now, how did that even happen?—blasted up from its throat to circle the bounds of the trap.

The dog whimpered and limped across the salt lines to slink between the couch and the wall.

"Oh, hell," Bobby muttered. Dean nodded, watching the smoke circle. It seemed kind of small for a demon. Meg had filled half the ceiling. Seemed like Sam's discarded powers had translated to exactly zip.

"Come on, what're you waiting for?" Dean growled, watching the smoke wisp across Sam's face and clenching his fists against the urge to blast it with salt all over again. The smoke slowed its spin, gathered itself, and poured up his nostrils.

Sam opened his eyes for the first time in almost two days, and they were black. He gasped, mouth gaping and shutting like a spasm, opened and shut his hands, and shuffled his feet.

He looked more dead now than he had lying on the sofa with a tube down his throat.

"I don't—" he mumbled. "Dean. Bobby. You—what the hell are you doing?"

"Summoning your dumb ass," said Dean. "The ghosts are camouflage to keep the demons and angels off our backs."

"You're a moron," said Sam, his face eerily flat. It reminded Dean a bit of Castiel, like he fit wrong in his own body. "I—demons—I smelled this from three states away. The other one, too. You gotta kill it. Stop burning those herbs."

"We'll get to that," said Dean. "Are you okay?"

Sam's black eyes hadn't blinked. "Okay," he echoed. "No. No, I'm not. I'm not alive anymore, Dean, I look at you and I just want to seep inside and smother your soul just to be warm again, and I'm a _demon_ and I know what it's like to be human. When we started killing them, they shoulda been _lining up_ to get Knifed if this is what it's like. Ruby—Ruby must've been suicidal, how else do you get a demon to take a deep cover mission with two hunters?" He thumped his chest, bringing blood up through his shirt from the fresh cut. "There's nothing alive in here." He hit himself again, a hollow thud.

"Hey," Dean croaked, almost reaching into the trap to grab him.

Sam swiped his fingers through the blood and held them up, red. "See this? I'm _here_. I don't make any brainwaves. I just found out I drank Azazel and Ruby, _literally_. I want to go back in the dog because the only time I feel halfway whole is when I'm raping something's soul. I don't want to live like this. I'll do it if you make me promise, I'll be Sam for you, but please, please don't make me."

"Sammy—"

"Please."

"We'll fix you."

"Please," Sam begged. Sam never begged since he was twelve. "Don't make me stay like this."

"Sam," Dean rasped, "I don't know what this screwed up situation did to your brain, but I'd never do that. We're gonna help you."

"I'm not me anymore."

"I get it," he insisted. "I'm not gonna make you live like this. Just give us a chance, come on, dude."

Sam stared at the sigils on the floor and shivered. "Okay."

"You know you can trust us," Dean insisted. _Right?_

"Okay."

"Dean," Bobby interrupted. "It's the pentacles. He's weak enough that they're compelling him to obedience."

Dean felt something crack in his brain. He swallowed.

"Assuming he ain't lying, that is," Bobby continued. "We gotta make a pact with him before we let him out, just in case."

"What kind of pact?" Dean grunted.

Bobby shrugged. "Robot's Code?"

* * *

Sam would not hurt or touch the mind of a human. He would not, by his inaction, allow a human to be gravely hurt or manipulated. He would not allow himself to become injured or compelled, any more than he already was. He would obey with all due expedience and consideration all instructions given him by Dean or Bobby, including instructions to violate the previous rules, provided he had no cause to believe Dean or Bobby's minds had been manipulated beforehand. He chafed at his confinement, but his disgust at his own weakness could drive him to no more than petulance.

Hunter robots were as screwed up as Hunters.

He was trying to think like Sam. Sam would be glad that Dean and Bobby were taking precautions; it wasn't like there was anyone who didn't have black eyes who could confirm his story. Sam wouldn't be stark terrified of sigils he'd been drawing and walking over for the past four years. Sam felt his heartbeat as a rhythm in his ears in the middle of the night, or the throb of a headache, or a visceral twitch when he leaned too long on his arm at one in the morning in front of the laptop, not as the slice of shutting valves or a wringing pressure that sent him shooting through the dark. Sam trusted his brother and didn't beg him not to enslave him like a perverse house-pet.

The dog, the one he'd practically run to death getting here, was whining softly from behind the couch as it licked its feet.

Sam was using the hands of his flesh that could grip and strike to thumb yellowed pages and compound sun-ruled herbs so they could clear the ghosts out of the yard and they could all have some breathing room. Then they'd find some way to shoot the other demon, and discover or invent some way to turn Sam back into a living soul.

Dean looked shell-shocked, probably from all the bombs Sam had dropped on him at once. There was another thing: the real Sam didn't spill his guts, he acknowledged his emotions and examined them in privacy, in an orderly fashion, and then brought problems of concern to both of them to Dean—keeping in mind that handing Dean a problem he couldn't fix was like showing Sisyphus another boulder to roll for when he was done with the current one.

Both Dean and Bobby looked horrible: stubble on Dean, shadows under their eyes, stains on their shirts. They smelled rank. The library had been practically unpacked, obliterating the Byzantine filing system; notes and printouts were scattered everywhere, the coffee was boiled into burnt syrup, and the kitchen sink was full of dirty chili cans with spoons in them. Oh, and Bobby had been letting indestructible spirits troop through his home like bums in a soup line.

Now that Sam was back, they were refortifying the house. Bobby had replaced the Hebrew versicle on the First Pentacle of the Moon that adorned the front door with another motto that Sam the human couldn't translate, but Sam the demon read as "you shall not pass" in firey bold underlined italics. The salt lines had been swept up and rearranged from crowd control to home defense. He could see crowds of ghosts milling outside, men and women and children and things that looked like nothing alive, fire-white sparks echoing burning, flinging out flesh-shapes like fog-shadow—like images from a slide projector. Pictures out of lights too bright to see.

Whatever.

Reaching for the dried peppermint, Sam felt a caustic chill run up into him from his left foot. Lifting his boot, he saw a few white crystals. He churned in his body and kicked the salt away.

He was so damn weak.

Dean startled him out of his mechanical herb-pounding by plunking a big glass popcorn bowl full of watery blood in front of him, saying, with that grin that said 'I'm in horrific agony right now; betcha can't make me admit it,' "Present for you, Sammy."

Blood of lost life. Pure. For him, in pure water from the innocent depths of the Earth.

Another great big basin o' blood.

He eyed it, wanting. Demons were so grasping and needy. "What's this for?"

"A free gift out of my own largess," Dean declared. Large-ess, like two words. Sam had to agree that English could sound pretty stupid. The phrase was classic for a peace-gift, meant to encourage a spirit's cooperation without sparking hostility or giving it power over the magician.

Bobby was watching him from across the room over a hodge-podge of grimoires. He gave Sam a commanding nod.

"For a couple of Hunters, you're pretty good at nigromancy," Sam remarked. His fingers hovered over the bowl, wanting, just wanting with no apology. The real Sam would be furious with himself for risking the unspoken truce between him and Dean: _if you don't act like a vampire again, I'll forget I ever thought of you as one._ Dean didn't look angry at him now, though. That was pity, for a _thing_ that couldn't help itself, and that was possibly worse.

He'd read a few accounts of demons claiming blood sacrifices. A loa might drink a few sips from a bowl. Kali bathed in it. He didn't want the taste of blood in his mouth, didn't want to freak Dean out even more though he already wouldn't meet his eyes, so he just dipped his hand in, into the cooling heat of lost life with no flashing spirit to guard it. His body froze at the contact as his awareness narrowed to his fingers, as he churned in his veins and rubbed himself against the blood and water like a cat twining around a doorframe, bottled soot streaming under flesh under blood, until the heat of the lamb faded and there was only water and death, dull and damp. He took hold of his eyes again. "Thanks," he said to the table, hollow-voiced, and chanced a look at Dean.

Dean was swallowing back bile and making dead eyes at the window. Tranced out.

Sam flicked blood at him. Dean gaped, scrubbing his face in slow motion, then whipped his arm across the table to smack Sam in the ear. "Bitch!"

Sam thought he should smirk at him, so he did. Dean scowled back. It was better.

"So the sacrifice is off the market," Bobby interrupted. "Think we'll be lucky enough that the demon'll just up and leave?"

"Don't think so. We both came here for the lamb, but before we caught the scent it was after me," Sam mused. "It's probably pissed that I got to it first."

"Think he knows who you are?" Bobby asked cautiously.

Sam stilled. They'd sort of made Bobby's home into a base over the last few years. If angels or demons wised up to just how often the Winchesters imposed on Bobby's hospitality, they'd lose it—the library, Bobby's business, everything. Bobby had never been cut out for a life on the road before he'd been chair-bound; now, even less so. "We'd better kill it," he said.

"Shit," said Bobby, smacking himself in the side of the head. "Bye bye bait."

"He recognized you?" Dean sputtered, ignoring him.

"No. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know anything, I didn't recognize _myself_ until you said my name." Sam realized he'd started talking faster and forgetting to move the rest of his body, paused, and tried to seem more natural. "It didn't make sense at the time, but I think it knew I was…a blank slate, when it saw me. It might not know any more than I did. Last I knew, there was a pack of ghosts saying twenty different exorcisms at it; it might not come back for a while if it can't shake them."

"Can it?" Bobby asked.

"It's a question of numbers," Sam said. "And power—it's strong. Old. Typical for what we handle, but compared to me, compared to the ghosts, it'll be a problem."

"How strong?"

Sam thought. "Don't really know. It TK'ed me. I've never seen normal demons do that to each-other; Ruby always had me do the…yeah."

Dean dropped his face into his hand, eyes flicking between his fingers between foot-in-mouth Sam and connecting-the-dots Bobby. Sam retreated into his veins. Came back up, shut his eyelids, and sunk back again, letting his own heart wring, wring, wring at the mainstream of his blood, where he was cold and lonely in his ill-fitting home that had no writhing light to warm him.

Hot lightening reached with flesh to warm his home, almost almost effectual, and he flowed beneath the contact, smoke past hide, reaching and yearning for life lost. His life was lost. "Dude," Dean was saying. "One problem at a time. No more going catatonic on me."

"Sorry I asked you to kill me again," Sam said, surfacing and watching his worried face. "It just sucks to be me right now."


	8. Delicate Flower

Dean likened their defensive situation to the Spider Brotherhood's Underground Island Lair in _The Phantom_. The bad guys had had a moat full of sharks, which ate a lot of their own defenders and barely slowed Phantom down as he swung in to rescue the girl and capture the mystical spirit skulls. Today, Dean, Bobby, and Sam were the Brotherhood and the stray demon was the Phantom, so their first step had to be to get rid of the ghosts that served as their own suicide moat.

Bobby had been the first to announce that they didn't know what they were dealing with, with the unmoored spirits, and in fact, they'd been damn lucky that salt and sigils worked on them at all. So, working from what they did have a handle on, they'd compounded a fume of herbs directly contrary to each component of the summoning, like hitting the undo button, hopefully. Anything attracted to one herb should be repulsed by its opposite.

All this yin-yang fire-and-water stuff seemed like untested bullshit to Dean, but he didn't make a career on skepticism. He poked at the wad of herbs sitting on the coals (mm, peppermint and castor beans), sipped some whiskey (looked like they'd be getting to the liquor store in a day or two, after all), and watched the dog.

The dog had slunk out from behind the couch and was prowling the perimeter, claws tapping over the floorboards. Sam was in the shower—might be why the dog dared show its pointy gray muzzle—and Bobby was in his books again working on a plan B, because if plan A was working at all, it wasn't working fast enough. They needed to give themselves some hunting room, not thin the ghosts just enough to provide the demon with cover fire. That left Dean alone with the greyhound and the Colt.

The dog was almost three feet tall, with short, useless fur, a ridiculously deep chest, delicate ears, and powerful thighs. It had lapped up two bowls of water, horked down some raw hamburger, whined at the rooster carrier, and studiously ignored the hand Dean had been dangling off the side of his chair for the last half hour. One of its feet was bleeding, leaving a trail of rusty splotches all around the house.

Dean figured it would recognize a demon; most dogs could. Whether it would bark if any approached the house or just crawl behind the couch again was another question. He hoped Sam's hitchhiking hadn't scarred the thing for life.

Damn it, Sam.

Sam had come back wrong.

No question this time. This Sam knew what Sam knew, but he didn't worry about the same things, didn't keep the same kind of secrets, moved wrong, like a goddamn robot with a glitchy motherboard. At least it wasn't the same kind of wrong as when Dean had seen Lucifer in him. Lucifer seemed to have some grade-school understanding of how to operate a human body, make expressions, multitask. Dean figured that if he handed Sam a stick of gum and told him to walk across the room, he'd trip on a sharp object and choke at the same time. It was like all that black smoke that Sam was now couldn't hold enough of the controls.

_How? _the back of his mind was screaming. Dean had never actually seen anyone go demonic when he'd been in Hell. Sure, Alistair had talked about it (over and over and over again, in this hypnotic drone that would have Dean half-convinced he'd gone under already) saying that one day he'd relish it, seek out horror and the creation of horror, yearn for the light of the sun on his face so he could snuff it into soot. Hell, he could think of a few times he actually had. But as for the actual mechanics of turning a soul from a humanoid astral projection into a cloud of smoke with crazy telekinetic powers, Dean had no clue. Maybe prospective demons needed a sponsor to get to the next level. Maybe they had to eat enough souls, like incorporeal wendigoes.

Maybe blood counted.

But Sam wasn't acting like he had on the blood, and he'd turned into a demon suddenly when touched by demonic offerings, which made the sponsorship angle more likely. Like vampires. And like vampires, demons were probably unwilling or unable to turn one of their own back to human. But Lucifer—he might need Sam undamaged.

Dean didn't feel like dancing with that grizzly bear right now.

There was a slurping sound and something brushed against his boot. He jerked in the chair and looked down, to see the dog reach after his leg and start licking his bootlaces. "Cut it out," he told it.

The dog ignored him, not even glancing his way when he poked it in the shoulder, just lick, lick, licking like he'd spilled barbecue sauce on his feet. Or cow blood. It was annoying.

He grabbed some blank notepaper and wadded it into a tight ball. "Here, boy!" he hissed, waving it in front of the dog's nose. When it looked up at his hand, he pitched it across the room. He pointed. "Get it!"

_What an idiot,_ said the dog's face. It bent toward his boot again, so Dean planted his hand on its rump and gave it a shove. The dog dug its claws into the floor and skidded a few inches before conceding the point and sauntering away.

Freak.

A few minutes later, after Bobby had had him throw some myrrh on the fire, which smelled awesome, the dog stuck its head in his lap and spat out the wadded paper ball, now soaked in drool, and stared up at him pleadingly.

"Freak," he told it, and tossed the spitball. The dog leapt after it, bounding over the piles of library to wipe out spectacularly on the hard floor across the room.

Sam came downstairs in the middle of their third spitball (they started to disintegrate pretty quickly, and the dog would end up bringing back a tiny strip of papier-mache dangling from its lip, tail whipping steadily and eyes intent). Dean gave the wad of paper and drool an extra brandish, but Sam just ignored him and headed for the pantry, his hair damp from the shower, to fix himself a PBJ.

Dean waited for the dog to bring the spitball back, until he realized it had slunk behind the couch again. So he watched Sam to make sure he didn't cut himself.

On a table knife. Jeeze. He looked out the window instead.

"Ghosts are thinning out," Sam said behind him, after a while. Black eyes. His face was aimed in the general direction of the window, toward the yard where no ghosts were visible to Dean right then. He had his sandwich on a paper towel and was chewing on a corner with no sign of actually enjoying it. Dean watched him swallow.

"What's our odds?"

"You'd get maybe five, ten yards before you met one. And then…" Sam trailed off, but he didn't do any of his usual Sam-trailing-off brow furrowing or slouching, just set the sandwich down on his paper towel. "I don't know what they'd do. It's not just that they're not tied down anywhere—they've got light, like a self-propagating vortex, like they just blew loose from their bodies—"

"Better safe than sorry," Dean interrupted, before Sam could get onto another creepy hallucinatory ramble about light and cold and emptiness.

Sam finished his sandwich and an orange as Dean worked on his whiskey and watched for invaders. There was something peaceful about a siege, knowing that you'd done all that could be done, and right now was as good as anything was going to get. Sam's boots clomped across the room, and the couch squeaked.

"I want to go back in the dog," Sam said.

Dean got whiskey down the wrong pipe, and _ow._ _Ow._ "Thought—" He coughed, tried again. "Thought you were gonna research this thing. Figure out what went wrong in Indianapolis."

"Can't read the books," Sam grunted, each word like a tiny logging axe cutting away at the stunted prickle bush that was Dean's optimism. "Not with the sigils and incantations in 'em. Can't handle half the amulets or unguents. The house is a minefield. It's just—it's so empty in here. Dark. Don't think we're meant to be like this, just exist without anything living, it's almost like being outside—"

"All right," Dean interrupted again. "I'll just…I'll let Bobby know, and we'll—you'd better tell him what happened from your end first—"

Sam slapped a sheaf of notepaper into his chest. "I should be good 'till morning," he said, stretching himself across the couch, "then I'll eat again, take care of things."

"Right," said Dean weakly. "Go easy on Axl this time, he's kinda freaked."

"Okay," Sam mumbled. "Axl. Shoulda guessed." His head dropped back against the couch arm, enemy black eyes clearing to human for just an instant, then smoke forced itself up from his mouth and nose with a listless groan, pluming up toward the ceiling like a heavy grease fire, like an old tired dragon waking up after a thousand years and looking to just cash it in. The stream broke, leaving Sam's mouth slack and his eyes clear and blank (somehow more alive than when he'd been moving around), and the smoke gathered itself and poured behind the couch.

The dog scuttled away, its rump popping out into view, then froze and crept deliberately back, lying very still and hidden in the dark.

Dean crumpled Sam's notes in his fist and went to find Bobby. They had to fix this shit.

* * *

"We gotta kill that demon before he runs off telling tales," Bobby growled—he was running on burnt coffee and off-brand chili, give him a break—as he flattened out Sam's…vision quest journal. Anyway, that's what it looks to read like, and Bobby'd read a few.

The typewriter-perfect italics were very Sam. The cross-outs, thick black scribbles in the margins, and rambling, psychedelic prose were not.

"How?" Dean demanded.

Good question. Demon hunting was normally a trapper's game; the bastards were just too smart, fast, and dangerous to go after without neutralizing first. The Winchesters had weapons, better than a tape recording and a boom box, better than any other hunter could hope for, but a demon could throw a man long before he got close enough to Knife it, and the Colt only had a lethal range of twenty yards. And those methods sacrificed innocents to a war they'd never even realize they'd been drafted into.

But trapping—it took time. You figured out the target's motivations, deduced or fabricated some place it had to be, and then you got there first. None of which they could do for Sam's mysterious new playmate.

"Get Sam to cut the hems off all the bedsheets and curtains," Bobby ordered, "and you sweep up what salt we can spare and stuff 'em with it. We're making a run for the van."

He half expected Dean's eyes to catch that young light, hear his voice rise astonished, asking if the van was ghost-proof, so Bobby could confirm gruffly that it should be, though he'd never been stupid enough to test it 'till now, and Dean would bounce a little and declare it "freakin' awesome" before leaping to work. But instead Dean just clenched his jaw like the all-American action hero he'd decided to be, and scrubbed the back of his neck like the scared worried kid he'd never had time to grow up from. "We got a time table here?" he asked. Hiding something.

"ASAP. What else?" Nothing else, please, nothing else.

"Nuthin'." Dean stuck his hands in his pockets and clomped out of the den.

Bobby skimmed over the papers for five seconds before slapping his hands to the palm-rails and torqueing away from the desk and after him.

Peeling into the living room, he saw Sam's socked feet flopped over the couch arm, Sam's face gazing vacantly up at the ceiling, unsouled. Saw the bow of Dean's back from across the other end, heard him talking to something in the shadows. Heard dog nails scrape against the floor.

"What in Sam Hell?" he demanded.

Dean popped up, guilt and defensiveness on his face in neon signage, and the dog crept out beside him. Black eyes.

"Sam," Bobby growled, and Dean angled in front of the dog just a smidgen, the scared kid neon blinking out in favor of unreasoning knife-gleam. "Dean, go cut up some bedsheets." Dean blinked at him, one hand drifting toward Sam-in-the-dog and the other toward Sam's body, but didn't move. "I ever give you reason not to trust me? Ever go behind your back? Go. Please."

Dean shuffled away toward the hall, gaze flicking back and forth. "What're you—what—"

"Use your imagination," Bobby snapped. Dean took the hint and scraped himself out of the room.

"Sam, _come_."

The dog—black eyes, black eyes in his home—tensed and cocked one ear at him.

"Damnit, sorry. Been a long couple days," Bobby muttered, looking away. "Wait, no, I'm not sorry. You're a goddamn dog. So _come_." He snapped his fingers beside his armrest. "Get your bony ass over here, boy, and look at me when I'm talking to you. _Sit._"

The dog's rump twitched for the floor, and Bobby wondered if that was a response from the—from Sam's host body, or John Winchester's training.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" he demanded. "You want to hide behind the couch until Dean and I fix all your problems? News to you—Dean ain't Superman and I ain't getting any new legs, and there's a goddamn ghost siege outside. We want to survive this, we need every pair of hands we got."

The dog put its ears back and hunched into its shoulders, radiating shame, and Bobby wondered how Sam showed himself in the dog's body like he'd been born into it, while in his own he was a puppet with half his strings missing. If Sam hadn't used the most compulsive layered protection system after the CIA's to lock down his laptop, Bobby would have had to assume he was, as Sam had put it, a blank slate. The dog had its own spirit, and Sam looked sorry like a sorry dog.

"Get back on your own feet," Bobby ordered.

Sam glowered at him for a moment, then fumed out of the dog, tipping its head back in a howl, and Bobby shuddered at the undernotes of a demon wailing on the air, the sound that always meant he'd won, before he knew if the victory meant anything. He watched as Sam poured himself into his own face while the dog bolted for the hall.

Sam opened black eyes and Bobby had to convince himself all over again that they'd actually found Dean's brother, the man they'd watched grow up, and not some infant demon that'd wandered in, looking for a name.

"You want to tell me what that was about?" Bobby asked.

"I will if you make me," Sam groused, lurching to his feet, and maybe that was Sam in there, after all.

"You put in your share of the work and it won't come to that," growled Bobby. "Just because dogs don't have thumbs…"

"What do you want me to do?"

Not fine, but close enough. "Got a sewing project for ya."


	9. Fences, Chains, and Anchors

The plan to get past the ghosts and into the van was a variation on the old salt-in-a-tube-sock trick. Bedsheets from houses and fancy hotels had wide hems, which in addition to tangling into uncomfortable bumps that left jagged dents in Dean's face in the morning, made a handy extra-long bag that could be cut off and filled with small granular weapons like buckshot, iron filings, or salt. The problem that kept mobile salt lines out of the usual Hunter toolbox was that they tended to kink, breaking the line, and if a guy could walk into a situation with a 15-pound 600 thread count hula hoop draped around his shoulders, it probably wasn't a situation that called for salt in the first place.

Sam had the lead, because he could see more of the ghosts. Dean was walking backward, bringing up the rear. Bobby was in the middle because he was the brains of the operation.

Dean and Sam each held a pair of forked hot-dog skewers to spread out the salt loop, giving Sam hand protection and both of them about a foot of working space where the ghosts couldn't freeze their limbs off. They'd had to do a funny little dance to get Sam past the salt at the front door, and they'd have to do another to break Sam into the van. Their mobile salt bunker was a bit cramped.

Wheels rumbled, clack-lumph, clack-lumph, down the boards of the new chair ramp that stuck off the side of the porch. They'd be losing daylight in another couple hours, Dean figured: sunbeams slanted yellow and hazy, and the air was still.

There probably wasn't a bird or a grasshopper around for miles. Any critter that could scram had scrammed; the ants would be holed up as deep in their tunnels as they could squeeze, the roaches were probably gone or headed for the Panic Room. Dean could see half a frontiersman leaning against the shell of a station-wagon, watching them with his single eye. They walked through one cold spot after another.

A black comet streaked overhead and Dean jumped. Bats. Creepy freakin' bats didn't care what kind of spooky crap was blowing around.

"Haven't seen him," said Sam out of the blue. Dean looked over his shoulder. Sam was making eye contact with an empty space about the level of his hip. "He's not here," Sam insisted. Apparently his personal ghost was being persistent, because he halted their procession, letting Bobby's footrests jab him in the calves. "Because I know how these things work," Sam snapped to thin air.

"Move it," Bobby barked. He and Dean shared a worried look.

Sam stalked on, stiff-legged. Dean adjusted his grips on the hot-dog forks, spreading the salt loop, and they marched around the house toward the small garage and Bobby's full-sized van, the kind you'd use to snatch a guy out of a parking lot, waiting under a corrugated steel overhang.

They reached the side of the van and set down the salt loop, letting Dean whip his pearl Colt, iron-loaded, out of his pants and scan the yard for anything that moved and wasn't translucent. Bobby handed the van keys and a pair of bolt cutters to Sam and raised Samuel Colt's Colt.

Behind them, Sam unlocked the cargo door and hissed. Dean spun. Sam was staring at the fingertips of his right hand, face wooden. "Switch," Dean said, passing his pistol to Sam. He checked the salt border—Sam had set it under the edge of the van, closing them in, good—and shoved the sliding door aside, revealing a crank-operated chair lift, a stack of blankets, a dozen ammo boxes for a .3006 and a .45, bulk canned stew, bottled water, and bagged salt. "It's the Apocamobile," Dean muttered. He looked for the barrier—there. A low rail of rebar, blessed, apparently, was welded to bare-scraped spots on the van floor, dipping and twisting to get around the tracks of the lift.

He set the jaws of the bolt cutters over a spot next to one weld and cranked on the handles.

This was a job for a saw.

Sam cursed.

"What?" Dean demanded.

"Ghosts," said Sam. "Hurry."

Dean cast a glance backward, and, crap, there was Bonnet Lady who hated Irish people, staring at Sam with Hollywood-perfect righteous fury. She looked like she should be framed by a cross and the Stars and Stripes, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in the background.

"Child of Satan," she intoned, "be gone from this man."

It was no kind of exorcism Dean had ever heard, but Sam twitched, leveling Dean's pistol at invisible forms, and Bobby snapped, "Sam, remember that binding symbol?"

How could Sam not remember the binding symbol Meg had put on him, it was branded into his arm.

"Yeah," Sam said.

"Carve yourself a fresh one. Make it bleed all around. Dean, put your back into it."

Dean wrapped himself around the bolt cutters and grunted. No way was Sam carving himself up because Dean couldn't cut through a half inch of shit steel.

He felt something give, and checked. A dent.

Bonnet Lady was still talking, and another of the ghosts Dean could see had joined her—"Christ defend this man. God defend this man, who is His own child, ransomed dear by the innocent blood of His Son, that no evil shall take hold of His earthly children." Sam was gasping, Bobby was rattling off something in Latin that was definitely not one of the Church's rituals.

Dean angled the bolt cutters and heaved again. Almost through.

"In Christ's Name, we rebuke you, demon," the ghosts said. _Te rogamus. In Nomine Christi._ "Tremble and be humble before Christ's eternal victory, bought with the blood of the Lamb, for the Lord's love is fathomless and His wrath is irresistible in the defense of His children."

Dean cranked the handles sideways, throwing his weight into them, and the rebar gave and popped up. "Sam, in!" he called.

Sam eyed the inch-wide gap, one arm wrapped over his ears, glanced over his shoulder at Bonnet Lady—"For the Evil One has no power over them who are reborn by the gift of Christ's blood"—and made a flying leap at the open door. He bounced, hitting an unseen wall six inches beyond the doorframe, and Dean thought he saw sparks. Sam staggered, clutched at the rebar for support, and recoiled with a hiss, fingers smoking.

"Bobby, the hell you ward this thing with?" Dean bellowed.

"D'you move the salt?" Bobby shot back.

Dean cursed, bent under the truck, and cut open the salt ring, leaving a horseshoe barricading them against the van's remaining wards.

Sam made another leap for the doorway, this time smacking into an invisible fence in the middle of the cabin. He batted at the air and raised his head to the ceiling. "Trap," he said.

"Cut him free and help me in," Bobby ordered. Dean scraped through the black paint that held Sam immobile, Bobby backed himself up against the running boards, and they grabbed hold of the chair from each end and heaved inside. Dean snagged the keys and slammed the door on the dead exorcists.

They panted in the dark and quiet for a while.

"All right," said Bobby, after they got their breaths back. "Let's go take care of that demon, get a motel in town, and sleep for a week."

* * *

**Note: **I wrote this part before 5.17, which gave me a better look at the salvage yard than I remembered seeing in earlier episodes like 4.1. So there's some inaccuracies in the layout and the piling of the cars, and probably Bobby's van, too. I also get the impression from 5.18 that there's no elevator down to the Panic Room like I assumed, but, again, ignorance.

Poor Sammy. Rock salt's not so fun anymore.


	10. Barn Door's Open

**Note:** I have no excuse for the unannounced two-month hiatus. I have reasons, but they're not good ones and they're boring. Updates are probably going to be shaky from here on out.

**Previously on Mad Science from Hell:** Sam's back - more or less - but the crisis continues with a demon prowling around the Yard, which is swarming with ghosts, some of whom Dean has trained to exorcise demons. A little incense is slowly clearing the ghosts out, but with the demon around, the gang's figured they'd best abandon the area and come back when it's safe to walk around outside without the protection of a salt-filled hula hoop. Using one such salt hoop, they've crossed the ghost-infested yard and have reached the ghost-proof, demon-proof van - first cutting through the blessed rebar wards in order to get Sam inside.

* * *

With a sack of salt slit in the bottom and set down over the gap in the rebar, they were good to move. Bobby drove; Dean had gone for the driver's seat first, punched helplessly at the disconnected clutch and gas pedals, and felt like an utter tool when Bobby pointed out the hand lever system.

They figured the demon would be avoiding the ghosts, but if it was still hanging around, it would be because it wanted Sam. To catch it, their best bet was to leave Spook Central, find a hill or someplace with decent visibility, stake Sam out like a sacrificial goat, and trap the demon. Then they'd Knife it. Time was, Dean would have a hard time pushing that past Bobby, but today they each agreed the host was acceptable collateral damage.

Demons had just wonderful ways of shredding your soul.

Dean crouched on the steel panel that covered over where the shotgun seat had been, watching the mirror and side window as they trundled through the junkyard along the gravel drive, lit warm and pink-orange in the retreating sun. He checked on Sam—kneeling on a pile of blankets, bracing against the jumps and sways of the shocks with his stiff-spread arms. Like the van's floor was bothering him and he was worried he'd fall on something blessed or salty.

They were approaching the main gate when the demon sprinted out from behind a column of scrap metal, knelt in the middle of the gravel road, and abandoned its host in an angry black funnel-cloud.

Bobby cursed louder than Dean had ever heard him, and yanked the brake lever. The van skidded. Sam slid forward faster than he could push off the blankets. Dean and the wheelchair rocked forward into the dashboard, and he clung there for an instant before two-hundred-some pounds of Sam ploughed into the backs of his knees.

Dean folded like a pup tent, tipped backwards, and smashed his head against something soft on the steel floor. Sam's hand.

The rest of Sam was crammed into the footwell with Dean's shins, and as the van rocked to a stop the wheelchair tipped, wobbled, and crashed onto Dean's face.

"Fix the salt," Bobby ordered.

Dean shoved and squirmed his way to freedom, staggering to his feet as Sam blinked dazedly, and glanced back into the cargo compartment. "Shit," he said. The twenty pound salt bag he'd set over the break in the sanctified ReBar had rolled over, spilling salt across half the floor. Dean snagged one of the blankets and quickly smeared the stray salt back into place, then righted the bag, sealing the wards again. "We good?" he asked, checking the cab.

"I think so," Sam said. He'd righted Bobby's wheelchair and was on his feet, examining something on the dash. Dean followed his glance to the path of the ReBar railing that curved up and around the dashboard, wire-tied to the plastic at the front edge of the windshield. Near miss.

"Demon bailed," Dean remarked, getting his bearings. He hadn't felt a thump under the front tires, but then again, he'd been in the process of backflipping over Sam at the time. He looked out the window, just as a dusty-looking tow-headed beanpole staggered to his feet, gripping the van's grille. _Mr. Singer,_ the guy mouthed, gape-jawed.

"Aw, dammit," said Bobby.

"Friend of yours?" Dean asked, oddly irritated.

Bobby scowled out the window. "Just open the sliding door." To the young man outside, he jerked his thumb, and the guy nodded and wobbled around the side, listing against the panels.

Dean planted a foot on the salt bag to pin it in place and slammed the door open, only to take a pointy, sunburned elbow dangerously close to the nuts. He grabbed the guy by his shoulders as he sagged for the floor. "Sam, little help?"

Sam loomed next to him and grabbed on, and together they got the man into the van and propped him up between a wall and another sack of salt. His limbs quivered and his eyes darted, feverish, from Dean to Sam to Bobby to Sam to the door to Sam…

Sam scrutinized him, still as a praying mantis, with black eyes staring, head tilted, arms resting on his knees.

Dean coughed. "Sam, go to the front. Get a blanket."

Sam stood with a jerk, clocked himself on the roof so hard the van echoed, and bent to grab one of Bobby's army blankets that had had them both sprawled out on the floor just a minute ago. Didn't even wince. Dean thought about leprosy, where your arms go numb and you go to sleep and wake up to discover that rats had eaten your hands off.

"Mr. Singer," the ex-host said. His eyes were scrunched shut now and he was clenching his fists. Dean draped the blanket around him and he flinched.

"Phil," said Bobby evenly, turned around in the front seat. "Your folks all right? Cindy?"

Phil's lips worked. "They, they…" He blinked and shoved himself out of his slouch. "I'm not tellin' you dirtbags anything! Should've damn well known, with the locks and shutting me out of the yard and the damn devil-marks in the bottom of that cistern—"

"Hey," barked Dean, gripping his shoulder roughly. "We're the good guys. We don't work with—Bobby doesn't work with—damnit, we kill those things."

Phil didn't look reassured.

"Dean," Bobby snapped.

"_What?_"

"Good Lord," Bobby growled. "Count the ammunition if it keeps you occupied, just get out of his face."

Dean grimaced and backed off, still scowling at Phil. Not that he could blame the poor guy, he just… Bobby heaved himself from the driver's seat to the chair by a handle bolted to the ceiling, and when he glided into the cargo area, Dean headed for the cab, squeezed past Sam, and sank into the warm upholstery.

"You asked why I'm such a paranoid old coot, well this is why," Bobby was saying to Phil.

Dean shut his eyes for a moment and let the bucket seat wrap around him and the sunset play across his eyelids as Bobby talked down the civilian. Deep breaths. So damn tired.

Sam's jacket rustled. Sam. Right. "How's your arm?" Dean demanded, straightening.

Sam blinked at him with those oily black eyes. "My arm?"

"The one you just cut a new lock into, genius. The bleeding one. Where's the first aid kit in this thing?"

"I got it," Bobby cut in.

"Bobby," said Dean, half rising from the seat, as Phil protested, "Mr. Singer—"

"I said, _I got it_," Bobby snarled. He shot the chair over a few feet, shimmied the front wheels to get a fold of blanket out of the way, yanked open one of the cupboard doors, and tossed a small tacklebox at Sam, who fumbled it on his elbow and miraculously recovered it an inch from the floor.

Dean took another deep breath. "Pass it over." He gripped the box between his knees, unfolded the neat trays of gauze and tourniquets and forceps and iodine, and grabbed Sam's left elbow. Sam rolled up his jacket and button-down sleeves, revealing a gigantic blood smear and a crude ring of slipping skin. "Getting sloppy, part of it still looks attached," Dean remarked. Goddamnit. He turned to Phil and Bobby. "Water?"

Bobby pointed out a box on the floor to Phil, who grabbed a bottle for him. Bobby threw it and Dean caught it, cracked the seal, and wet some gauze.

Once he had most of the blood cleared away, he could see what he was dealing with. Sam's hand must have been shaking when he'd done the sigil—parts of the circle went clear through the skin, he'd nicked a vein that had half-soaked both layers of sleeves, the hatch mark looked like it'd gone into the muscle, and half an inch hadn't even been touched. "About as secure as a pair of pasties in August when the air conditioning's broke," he muttered. Good thing they'd gotten Sam into the van when they had, or who knows where those ghosts would have sent him.

He cleaned the wound out the best he could and slapped some butterfly bandages on it, figuring it could keep until they got to Sioux Falls, then, if it turned out not to be infected, he'd stitch it. Sam held as still as a medic could ask for as he tugged and prodded and swabbed with painful antiseptic before strapping the whole thing up in a roll of wide gauze.

"That'll hold ya," he said, slapping Sam on the shoulder.

Sam was watching Bobby. "Does he know anything?"

"Hold yer horses," said Bobby. "Phil, in all the years I've worked with your daddy, there's never been no ill come to him from me. I never cheated him, never hurt nobody, for God's sake, I let him take a six-cylinder off the lot for three-twenty back in '05, and you've been walkin' in and outta here four days a week for the past three months. You never seen no trouble 'til these chuckleheads trailed it in after 'em."

"You," Phil panted. "You kill these things?"

Bobby sighed. "Whenever it's practical."

Phil dug out a water bottle for himself and took a long sip. "Okay."

"Good," said Bobby. "Do you know anything? Did it do something, let anything slip, was it planning anything?"

Phil shook his head. "Not like that," he muttered. "Not like, like voices in my head or nothin'. Just hung around the yard. Ran a bit. Beat on somebody's dog."

"You sure?" Sam asked. Dean saw with a start that he'd managed to clear the black out of his eyes to talk to Phil. Be nice if he could have picked up that trick earlier, and let everyone's blood pressure come down a few notches.

Phil shook his head. "Gave me a message for you before it left. Thought maybe it was some kinda demon gang war or something, but I guess it's just scared of you all. Said it'd come back with a machine gun."

"Machine gun," Bobby echoed, eyebrows raised.

"This thing bullet proof?" Dean asked, patting the door.

"Project for another weekend," Bobby replied. "So Phil here was just the first convenient host, and now it's gone to find somebody better armed. Rancher or a cop."

"We could make more hex bags, throw it off the scent," Dean grudgingly suggested.

"Won't work," said Bobby, as Sam shook his head. "It's been in Phil, it can figure out what's in the house."

"What's in the house?" Phil asked.

"Drink your water. There's crannies and rocks we can use for defense, and with the thirty-ought-six, I can disable its gun so I get a chance at trapping it," Bobby growled. "Nothing's getting into the library."

"You mean 'we,'" said Dean, imagining Bobby wrestling his way up a hillside so he could have his one-man-stand. And Sam accused _him_ of having a hero complex.

"I'm not risking your lives over a pile of books," Bobby insisted.

"Like you could keep Sam away with a roll of razor-wire," Dean snorted. "Those books save our asses every other job."

Bobby glared at him. Dean steeled himself and glared back; it wasn't often that he had logic on his side, and he was not losing Bobby today.

"We need help," Sam interrupted. "Something the demon won't know how to handle."

Dean blinked at him. Sam was still disjointed and mechanical; his eyes were clear again, but he still couldn't see Sam in them.

Bobby seemed to know what Sam meant, luckily, because Dean was at a loss. "No," Bobby snapped. "We are not calling in your pet angel."

"Hey," said Dean, brightening. Cas was pretty good in a corner, as long as he didn't need to do any acting.

"No," said Bobby again. "I mean it. That thing ain't reliable. It ain't human, it don't follow orders—"

"He can do that teleport thing and he's bullet-proof," Dean insisted. "We give him the Knife, he tracks it down or sees it coming, whichever, and poof, no more demon."

"Castiel got good Hunters killed," Bobby snarled.

Ellen and Jo. Dean sobered.

They still didn't know what had held up Cas in Carthage, while Hellhounds ripped into Jo's ribs and they'd all holed up to turn a hardware store into a weapon. They just knew that Cas had been too late to help the Harvelles, but right on time to save the Winchesters. Dean had noticed that he seemed to be the only person who actually liked the guy, but he didn't like to think that he was also the only person who had any reason to.

"Whatever," said Dean. "I'm calling him."

"_Whatever?_ That all you got to say?" Bobby demanded.

"Yes!" snapped Dean. "All right? Sure he screwed up, bad, but nobody was expecting Hellhounds. We went in loaded for bear and it wasn't enough. Cas can take care of one demon, and he's got to know something about fixing Sam."

"Dean's right," said Sam.

Dean growled, pawed violently through his coat pockets, and retrieved his phone. Speed dial number three. Pick-up on the first ring. "Hey, Cas," he said. "You busy?"

"Yes," announced the angel's sepulchral voice.

Dean grimaced. "Can, you, uh, put it on hold a few hours?"

"Yes. Where are you?"

"Bobby's yard, by the big gate. We're in a white van—"

Phil yelped, and Dean spun around just in time to see Cas lifting two fingers off of Phil's forehead as he slumped on the floor, angel-whammied. Castiel straightened as much as he could under the van's roof, his vessel's springy black hair smashed against the steel, arms dangling outside his trench-coat pockets, eyes staring. He glanced at Sam, who stared back at him, and his stare turned to a squint. "Dean, there's a matter I must discuss with you in private."

Dean cursed to himself as he realized how close he'd been to getting Sam angel-smited. "No," he said, thrusting an arm in front of Sam. "No, this is part of the problem. Sam got turned into a demon."

Cas'—Jimmy's—round eyes got round again. "I wasn't aware—I must discuss this matter…urgently."

"No, Cas, he's still _Sam_. He didn't turn evil, it just happened by accident, I don't know, it was just—one minute he's fine, next he's getting exorcised by his own freakin' tattoo."

"Before we get around to Sam," Bobby interrupted, "there's a demon after us needs killing. Dean, give him the Knife."

Bobby was thread-bare and pissed-off. Dean decided not to poke the bear, unsheathed the Knife from his belt, and handed it to Cas.

Cas held the Knife.

"Put it in your pocket or something," Dean said. "You look like you're gonna star in your own slasher flic."

"Might as well take Phil to the ER while he's at it," said Bobby. "With any luck, he'll put the whole thing down to heat stroke and head trauma."

Cas looked down at Phil. "This man hasn't suffered a head trauma," he announced.

"So keep it that way," said Bobby. "I need my gofer with his wits intact."

"You're certain that this is Samuel Winchester?" Cas demanded, barging into Dean's personal space. Dean got distracted for a moment by a weird vein on Jimmy's right eye that looked like the letter Z.

"Yeah," he said, patting Sam's shoulder. "We checked. He's having a really bad day, and we just—sooner he gets fixed, the better."

"I am unaware of any reliable method to do so," said Cas.

Dean's chest went cold and he lunged for him, just as Castiel bent to the side, grabbed Phil's shoulder, and vanished without even a rustle of wind. Dean's fist was caught on empty air. He dropped his arm, straightened in the seat, and stared out the window at the little asphalt strip beyond the gate. "F—" he whispered.

"Well," said Bobby, "now we have our own personal teleporter to get us through the ghosts, we might as well head back to the books and work up some theories."

Dean nodded. He got out of the driver's seat, Bobby lifted himself into it, and they hung a u-ey and rumbled back toward the house, Dean hunched on a sack of salt, Sam staring silently out the window.

* * *

Apart.

Apart, a part without parts, fragment without union, atomized, all weakness, all loss, all separation, all lack: hole without space, void without time, need without hunger, without self.

I, it piped, so weak, so weak. I I I I I I—

And its self congealed around it, and it was one under the scorn of the stars and the burn of the wind, one and alone between the enmity of earth and iron. It writhed upon the grating air. In the shadows of iron it hid from the departing sun, quailing before an apparition of iron and salt and hatred, hatred that would strike it with terror had it flesh for terror.

The thing of iron and hatred bore two bright hot lights as it departed, so brilliant, knots of coiled white fire that pulsed and rippled, blazing with every glory that it had not, that it desired and envied. But the chained fires were sealed away. Another of its kind was with them.

If it could, it would feel rage, but it had no flesh to feel it in; the desire to feel rage drove it under and between the cold-searing mounds of iron and earth, seeping and probing for some other light, some warm thing in which to still its self. It searched long and desperate, for the land was near barren of sparks, and in its pride it disdained those first few fires it found—until, in a deep of earth under iron, it met a slow and cautious blaze double-coiled as its flesh coiled. It drove itself upon that spark, and it was not repulsed.

Blood churned sluggish. Fire smoldered low. It made its new host writhe within its earth-home and felt rage.

Anchored and at leisure, it pondered how to satisfy its rage.

It had woken torn and lost, atomized within the air, no light, no shelter, ripped from its host. It supposed that it was weak and small for its kind. It was prey. The other of its kind had been close enough to prey upon it, to subdue it and wrench it from its host and take it for its own.

It stirred in its host's blood and wormed itself about the slow fire in its flesh.

The other was stronger, so it had no chance of retrieving the host it had stolen, not until it was vacant. It would wait, frustrated and prudent, for the other to move on, and then it would seize its old host with its hands that could grip and strike, and chase after the other with all the weapons its vengeance could muster, and the other would never shame it again.

An unpleasant memory of a lonely expanse of cold blood and lightless flesh disturbed it, and it wondered why it had taken such a host, stripped of its glory. It recalled.

Recollected.

_Oh, shit_, Sam thought.


End file.
